Category: Instant Pot

Did I mention that the only cooking items I brought on my move to LA were my air fryer, 1 pan, and my Instant Pot? Well, this Instant Pot does it all, so why bother with additional cooking gadgets?

Last night I made, hands down, the BEST homemade enchilada sauce I have ever made! Sure, I might be a Midwesterner who hasn’t ever made enchilada sauce before, but enchiladas are one of my favorite foods! So although my culinary skills might not be up to pro status, my making yummy 😋 edible meals for me and my toddler skills seem to be on point!

I started with a pretty simple recipe with positive reviews from here:

Homemade Enchilada Sauce

I didn’t have chicken stock, though, so I added water and 2tbs of better than bouillon instead. It came or DELICIOUS! And the best part? I made it in the same pot I’d be doing the casserole in!

So the casserole was nothing fancy. I took 5 (though I highly recommend 8-10) small flour (feel free to use corn) tortillas and cut them up into bite-sized pieces my toddler would eat. But really–you could simply halve them or quarter them if you preferred.

Now remember that Salsa Chicken I made the other day? Well, here is where the leftovers come in! I tossed in the remaining shredded chicken (about 1 and 1/2 to 2 cups), the tortillas, and about 1 to 1 and 1/2 cup of cheese. If I’d had olives on hand, I would have tossed those in, too!

Stir, seal & cook on manual high for 3 minutes to melt the cheese. Serve with your favorite enchilada toppings like sour cream, olives, or even more shredded cheese!

And because I’m doing the single mom thing, I filled a few 8oz containers to pop in the freezer for individual meals at a later time 🙂

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Instant Pot Enchilada casserole

Ingredients

1-2 cups of enchilada sauce (recipe for easy homemade sauce above!)

8-10 fajita size flour or corn tortillas cut into whatever size you like (feel free to use more or less tortillas–it’s your casserole!)

1-2 cups of shredded chicken

1-2 cups of shredded fiesta mix cheese

Optional: olives, sour cream, or other enchilada toppings

Directions

All of the recipes I am sharing will include some room for tweaking the ingredients to your preferences. Sometimes when we cook new things, we get so caught up on having the perfect amount of the perfect ingredients that we miss out on making something totally yummy and saving money at the same time.

1. Add desired quantity of each ingredient to the instant pot and stir. If it seems too saucy, add more tortillas. If it seems too dry, add more sauce!
2. Seal the instant pot and cook on manual high for 3 minutes with a quick pressure release. You’re just melting the cheese, here.
3. Serve with optional toppings!

What do you do when you wake up at 5:00 A.M. and your toddler is still asleep? How do you use that precious free time–making sure you get the most out of it since you probably won’t have free time/ alone time again until after 9:00 P.M.? You play with your Instant Pot, of course!

Do you remember that show on the Food Network–Semi Homemade with Sandra Lee? I feel like Sandra Lee might be my spirit animal. I LOVE cooking, but when it comes to cooking, I also tend to take the path of least resistance. This means if I don’t have an ingredient, I’ll find a substitute or skip it altogether. It also means I just kind of wing-it sometimes and hope for the best!

So I’ve been dying to try these copycat Starbucks Sous Vide Egg Bites with my Instant Pot. Since I had some free time this morning, I decided to see what I had in the fridge that I could toss into a wannabe Sou Vide Egg Bite recipe. Here’s what I came up with:

Eggs were an obvious choice for this recipe 💁‍♀️. I wanted some sort of meat for flavor, but I all I had was processed lunch meat. Not the best choice for a wannabe fancy recipe, but Leah loves it, so why not? I also had Mexican Style cheese, and a mozzarella cheese stick 🤷🏼‍♀️. A girl needs variety! How many people would blog about using string cheese in a recipe? Ha!

For the veggies, I had spinach and broccoli in my fridge that was going to go bad soon, so I decided to use both in my egg bites. For seasonings, I chose to keep it simple with garlic powder and salt. Sadly, I had no heavy cream, so I made do with milk for the egg mixture.

I chopped up all the ingredients, but first attempted to peel or “string” the string cheese. That got old real quick 🙅🏼‍♀️, so I resorted to dicing it at some point. I used about 3 pieces of broccoli and only chopped the florets. I used about 3 pieces of spinach and and tried to chop it small enough to pretend it’s basil.

Isn’t that the prettiest silicone mold you’ve ever seen??? I started by spraying it down with coconut oil. Okay, if we’re being honest, I started adding ingredients, remembered I had wanted to spray it with oil, then added the oil over the ingredients 🤷🏼‍♀️. Seemed to work out okay!

I started by adding the chopped ham and turkey lunch meat to the bottom of each egg cup. I was afraid the lunch meat would sink through the egg bites and make them less than pretty, so I added only a bit it each cup. I added spinach to about half the cups because I though doubling up on the greens was pushing my luck with my toddler. I added a bit of shredded cheese to each cup.

After mixing 4 eggs (the perfect amount!) with about 1/8 tsp of salt and garlic powder, I poured the egg mixture into each cup until they were about 3/4 full, then added in the chopped broccoli and mozzarella. Once the egg bites are cooked, you will flip the silicone mold and he rounded part will the top–so I hoped adding heavier ingredients would keep the tops pretty.

I opted to cover the silicone mold with tinfoil to prevent water from dripping into the egg bites when I removed the IP lid.

I added 1 1/2 cups of water, my trivet, then the silicone mold.

I sealed my IP, cooked on manual high for 10 mins with a 10 min NPR.

The results?

Not as pretty as Starbucks’, but toddler approved!

Continue reading “Semi-Sous Vide Egg Bites” →