Two awesome things happened this week: we got a snow day from work AND my mother-in-law learned how to hashtag. Group text messages are about to reach a whole other level of entertaining!

Now with these blizzard conditions, we’re obviously stuck  psyched to be tucked inside for the day, giving us the perfect excuse to experiment with our brand-spanking new pressure cooker (which I’ve been told can double as a slow-cooker, so let’s hope I don’t royally fuck this up.) I’m using a Cooking Light recipe, but modifying cooking time to fit the pressure cooker. here goes….

BUT FIRST, allow me to introduce you to our pressure cooker. (It only took an extra 20 minutes to get it out of the coat closet — gotta love newlywed apartment life — and assemble.)

INGREDIENTS:

• 1 (1-pound) top round steak (1 inch thick), trimmed (I don’t know what trimmed means, so I’m going to assume the piece of meat we bought is good to go, as-is.)
• 1 cup chopped onion (I’m using sweet onions because they were literally the last bag left at the grocery store as people stocked up for snowmageddon)
• 2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley (I’m using dried parsley so I’ll only need half the amount here.)
• 2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon dried dill (I’m using fresh only because I had some on hand from a previous tzatziki recipe)
• 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• 1 (8-ounce) package sliced mushrooms (about 2 cups)
• 3 garlic cloves, minced (I’ll be using 5)
• 1.5 ounces all-purpose flour (about 1/3 cup) – why the hell would anyone use ounces for dry ingredients?!?!
• 1 cup fat-free, lower-sodium beef broth
• 1 (8-ounce) container low-fat sour cream – ONE CUP of sour cream. my frustration with the metric system grows…also, you can leave this in the fridge until you’re ready to serve, no need to measure out now.

PROCEDURE

1. Cut steak into a bunch of smaller pieces. Recipe says 1/4 inch, but I just did bite-size amounts.

2. Whisk together the flour and beef broth until smooth.

3. Add all ingredients to the pressure cooker.

Okay, so here’s where things went really south. In fact, hubs is at the gym right now to avoid us yelling at each other any more. The instructions on using the pressure cooker are NOT easy to read. Also, it’s come to our attention that even on “low pressure” this meal is going to cook wayyyyy faster than we need (it’s noon now and we don’t plan to eat dinner for another 7 hours.) Unfortunately, we already started the “simmer” function and it seems much of the meat has browned. I’m just going to hope this is the equivalent of “cooking on high setting for one hour” as the original recipe says.

I may or may not have lost my patience with the new kitchen tool and opted for using our old crock pot. We moved all the ingredients from the pressure cooker to the slow cooker and set it to low. Now we wait.

I’ll update this post after dinner and let you know how badly we messed it all up. Maybe we’re not quite ready to branch out of our Crock Pot comfort zone.