Recipe Review Saturday

I had an idea. Does anyone else want to do recipe reviews and link up? You can, of course, do  your posts any day of the week but then come here and link up. I’ll add link boxes maybe til the first of February and if there’s any interest, I’ll continue and if not, I’ll drop back to just  my own reviews. How does that sound? And, I’ll make two link boxes and we’ll see if that gets too confusing . . one for pressure cookers and one for everything else. It can be a main dish or a dessert or a drink . . anything you choose. The only thing I ask is that it be something you’ve tried and are willing to review. Aspects I love to see covered are:

• Did you like it?
• Did your family (if there is one) like it?
• What did you change, if anything?
• Would you make it again and, if so, what would you change?

On to my review . .

Recipes in my pressure cooker are like the quilts and sweaters I make in that each one becomes my new favorite. This week I made Cafe Rio Sweet Pork Tostados.  You HAVE to try this. Even if you don’t have a pressure cooker, do it in your slow cooker . . just do it! Maybe because it says “sweet” and my idea of sweet is apple pie and homemade vanilla ice cream . . but I expected it to be sweeter. When I first tasted it as I was shredding the meat, I thought . . next time I’ll add more brown sugar, but after eating it, I think the sweetness is just perfect as is.

After about the third day of eating the leftovers, I said to Vince “I could eat this every day!” Really .. it’s that good! The meat goes a really long way because it’s shredded and used along with other ingredients. I could see this being served for a party or social gathering where you just set out the “fixings” — tostados or chips, meat, shredded lettuce, tomatoes, cheese, guacamole, sour cream, black olives . . whatever you wanted . . and folk could fix their own.

The first night, we had it as shown above. We’ve also:

• Cut the tortillas into fairly small slices, fried those up and put them in the bottom of a bowl and fixed it from there.
• Used Fritos in the bottom of a bowl and fixed it from there.
• Mixed it with a bit of BBQ sauce and served it on buns.

This recipe is as close to perfect, in the opinion of my taste buds, as it gets.

The second pressure cooker recipe I made this week was Easy Pork Chops. Like the pressure cooker lady said . . she doesn’t use a lot of canned soups but she made the exception for the cream of mushroom soup in this recipe and I did too.

The Cuisinart pressure cooker does such a good job of browning. It’s so nice to be able to do everything in one pot. The browning feature was one I doubted til using it.

This also was delicious and something I’ll make again. I did a few things differently for this recipe. Remember when I got a deal on marked down mushrooms and I dehydrated them?

I used a few of those in this dish. Here are the things I did differently:

• Instead of deglazing the pot with water, I had a bottle of Chardonnay open and I used that.
• Added a handful of mushrooms when I added the pork chops back to the pot.
• I added about 1/2 tsp. of dried thyme.
• I added a sprig of rosemary.

We get a lot of pork chops from the pig we get from our friend each year and they aren’t always as tender enough to grill so this recipe is perfect for using those. We’ll definitely make this recipe again . . probably this week! Our pork chops are put up in packages of 3 — 2 for Vince and 1 for me so we had no leftovers. I think I’ll use 2 packs of pork chops next time so we can have leftovers. There’s definitely enough gravy for two meals in there.

Also, I cooked the black eyed peas in the pressure cooker. I used 1 pound so we would have them leftover. I didn’t use a recipe . . simply browned some sliced sausage links, added a few onions, garlic, bell pepper and diced jalapeno pepper, water and beans and cooked them about 13 minutes on high.

With the leftover black eyed peas, I made Black Eyed Pea Cornbread. We love this and it has become a New Year’s tradition for using the leftover black eyed peas. If you like black eyed peas and you like cornbread, you will like this recipe. This recipe can easily be divided in half if you don’t want an entire 9″ x 13″ dish but it heats up nicely and is good to serve with soup. I didn’t take a new picture so this is from the recipe post. 

I think that’s about all I did that was interesting this week.

If you have a pressure cooker recipe to review, please link to it in this box.

If you have anything other than a pressure cooker recipe to review, please link to it in this box.