Here’s my new best friend:

Isn’t she beautiful? An 8.5l Danish pressure cooker able to produce rich, luscious meals like this in 20 minutes:

I wrote earlier about listening to Suzanne Gibbs describe the joy of pressure cooking.  It’s not the convenience of a meal in 45 minutes or less that’s the real attraction. Let’s face it, a good stir fry will do that for you. It’s the flavour – rich and intense – without 3 hours of simmering.

I rarely have the time and the energy to do beautiful, long, slow cooking on the weekends. I enjoy that kind of cooking and the meals it can produce but it’s just not been happening for the last 12 months or more.

And the demand for food around here has gone up incredibly since a black hole took up residence in the lad’s stomach. We need to have on hand healthy, filling food that’s flavoursome and enjoyable. We already cook for six to take that into account and even that hasn’t been enough. Add to that our good intentions to take leftovers to work for lunch and we’re looking at serious amounts of food.

So now I can produce the volume of food we need in the limited amount of time that I have. And there’s the little extras that have fallen by the wayside – quinces poached in red wine with cinnamon. Well, I just took that off the stove 40 minutes after peeling the quinces.

All my new bestie needs now is a name.