Pages

Monday, February 22, 2021

Instant Cooking with Six Sisters' Stuff: A Fast, Easy, and Delicious Way to Feed Your Family

Instant Cooking with Six Sisters' Stuff: A Fast, Easy, and Delicious Way to Feed Your Family

Book Summary:

Six Sisters' Stuff is one of the most popular blogs for quick and easy cooking and entertaining at home for families. In their tenth cookbook, the sisters introduce a new wrinkle to their repertoire—"instant" cooking in a multicooker, such as the Instant Pot. Multicookers are a fantastic tool for those looking to save time in the kitchen as well as those who are looking for simpler, more flavorful, and healthier fare.

With more than 100 recipes specifically designed for and tested in an electronic multicooker, everyone from beginning cooks to experienced chefs can find something to master in Instant Cooking with Six Sisters' Stuff. From entrees to side dishes to desserts, there are multicooker options available that fit the bill.

Tarah's Review:

 I love a new cookbook filled with glossy (which is important for wiping it off if something gets dropped on in) pictures full easy and quick recipes. I also love my Instapot (which is probably a different brand, but same thing anyway). After making hard boiled eggs in the instapot, it's hard to go back to the way I was doing it before. But that is neither here, nor there. 

I love that most recipes are super simple. I'm trying to teach my kids to cook, and this is a handy tool for them to use. My 15 year old daughter made the Cheesy Chicken and Rice and had no problems whatsoever, and I had left-overs for lunch which was incredibly handy :) 

Some of my favorites in this book include the sesame chicken. I'm a sucker for this kind of chicken. I like most recipes I find of this. We also really liked the Beef and Broccoli (well, my 8 year old did not appreciate the broccoli, and there may have been tears, but she hates broccoli in any form). 

There were some things that I struggled with in this cookbook though. It seemed that some of the recipes were actually more complicated in the instapot than if I were to cook them regularly. For example: We love French Dip sandwiches in our family, and I make them when I don't have a lot of time. When I make them the old way they take me...maybe 15 minutes to put together (that's being extremely generous) and 1 to 2 minutes under the broiler. This recipe was very bland and it took over an hour. I wasn't super happy with that. We also tried the Cherry Dump Cake and it didn't work for me at all. I will admit that when I've tried this in the oven it also hasn't worked. The only way I can make this recipe work is with sprite and in a Dutch Oven. Every other time the cake mix doesn't change from the powered unless it is covered in butter. And even though I was careful to arrange the butter to cover as much as I could, there was still a lot of powder, and no cake when I was done.  So this could be user error (I'm not a fabulous cook), it left a lot to be desired for me. 

Rorie's Review:

I have had my Instant Pot for several years, and I kinda love it, but am still pretty intimidated by it. I was hoping that by getting this cookbook, I would start to use it more. So far, it has not. But that might be more because I just don't really enjoy cooking and have a hard time motivating myself to do so. 

At any rate, I've made 3 of the recipes so far and have a handful more down on my menu plan for the next week or two. We really enjoyed the Buffalo Chicken Wraps and Homemade Ground Turkey Pasta Sauce. I changed that recipe up a bit by adding the spaghetti in and trying to cook it all at the same time. That's going to take some tweaking, but the sauce was really good. I made the homemade yogurt today - which was actually a main reason that I bought this thing in the first place, and I've never been brave enough to try it before now - it's cooling in the fridge now, so hopefully when we try it tomorrow, it will be good. My kids devour yogurt like it's going out of style, so making it instead of buying it would be really nice.

I admit I wasn't all that thrilled with the cover of the book. Kind of brown and bland. I prefer colors that are bright and pop off the page. That being said, the food pictures inside the book are well done and look very appetizing. All in all, I'm happy to add this book to my collection.

Andrea's Review:

When I heard about this new Six Sisters cookbook, I was excited for some yummy recipes to help me more fully utilize my Instant Pot. I regularly use it for a couple of recipes, so this was just the push I needed. I don't love the look of this cookbook's cover with the mustard color and the image of the pasta dish, but I am happy they kept with the wipeable cover and color photos of each recipe.

My Instant Pot only came with a trivet, so I didn't have the accessories needed for many of the recipes. I did order a set though, and am looking forward to testing them soon.

So far I've made the hot chocolate, the apple crisp and the honey-soy pork chops. 

I was low on milk so I halved the recipe for the hot chocolate. When I did the pressure release I was very surprised to have hot chocolate spray out. I've only ever had steam come out of the pressure valve before. The inside of the pot and lid were splattered, and the mixture needed a lot more whisking. It tasked quite good, but the mess makes me hesitant to try it again. I wonder if I hadn't halved it if I would have still had the same issues.

The apple crisp was very tasty. The instructions said to only cook it for 1 minute though, and that didn't sound right. I googled it and found a Six Sisters video for apple crisp where she said she cooks it for 5 minutes, so I did that instead. I don't think the oats would have been cooked enough if I'd followed the written instructions.

The pork chops had such a good flavor and were easy. They were tough, but I don't know that I've ever had pork chops that aren't tough.

One misnomer about the Instant Pot is that it's, well, instant. This cookbook is packed with yummy sounding recipes, and while I agree with the cover's claim that they're easy and delicious, don't take the title "Instant Cooking" as an indication of how quickly your meals will be ready. I'm very interested in trying the corn bread, for example, but the total time listed is one hour-30 minutes longer than it takes me to make my go-to recipe in the oven.

Title: Instant Cooking with Six Sisters' Stuff 
Author: Six Sisters
Publisher: Shadow Mountain
Published: January 2021
ISBN: 1629727911
Source: We received copies from the publisher. All opinions expressed are our own.

No comments:

Post a Comment