Trials and Tribulations with the Instant Pot

Remember how in my last post, which I just posted, so there's no way you'd remember—how I said I'm being 100% honest on this blog?

I was really excited about my dinner tonight and I messed it up. I'm still learning how to use my Instant Pot. It's a useful contraption that triples as a rice cooker, pressure cooker, and slow cooker. It offers total control and flexibility and precision... once you learn how to use it.

I'm still a novice. I turned a pile of beautiful fresh ingredients into this:

How romantic.

I wanted to create a spicy, gingery coconut curry with locally grown ingredients. Out here on the island, that means okinawan sweet potatoes which are purple inside (yaaaas spud), malabar spinach which I discovered is ungodly slimy, young ginger which is so tender you can cut it with a spoon, kaffir lime leaves that infuse everything with a wonderful perfume, and locally grown eggplants of course.

I wanted to make sure everything would be cooked to perfection (ahem) so I thought I'd do three rounds of quick pressure cook: one longer round for the potatoes and chana dal (which is a toothsome lentil that takes a while to cook), followed by a short cook on the eggplants and one last round for the spinach. My mistake was that okinawan potatoes cook faster than I thought, so these dissolved into mushy gooey pulp. The lentils were overdone too. It's a gloppy mess, BUT:

It tastes fabulous!

So glop. So yum.

Ergo: I'm posting the recipe anyway. Take these ingredients as inspiration and do with them what you please. Cook them as long as you like, in whatever order you like.

Ingredients
eggplants
5 shallots, peeled and halved
1 large jalapeño, seeded and chopped
tons of chopped ginger
a few cloves of chopped garlic
chana dal
spinach
sweet potatoes, peeled and chopped
1 can of coconut milk
coconut oil
turmeric
tikka masala spice blend, or any spices you like (Thai curry would work better, actually, and then omit the lentils)
kaffir lime leaves (2 is enough)
salt to taste

Method not to do

Fry up ginger, peppers, lime leaves, and shallots in oil.

Add spices and lentils.

Add water and half the can of coconut milk. Seal up your cooker and go.

Meanwhile, prep the spinach and eggplant. Add that in at some point and overcook until it looks like...

...this. Salt to taste.

I would be embarrassed about this final product except it tastes so good. I leave it to you, dear reader, to rectify my mistakes and make this a perfect dish.