I often cook rice or beans in a light weight stainless steel bowl with a folded band of aluminum foil under it to lift bowl when food cooked. Water is added to the bottom of the pot, a rack inserted, and foil covers bowl and contents. If the rice bean calls for 2 cups water to one cup rice or beans, I add that to bowl before covering it with foil. I also season bowl before doing this. Reason - I am a 2 person family. If I want to cook rice or beans for one meal, I cannot cook this small amount in my 6 quart Presto cooker. Cooking it in a bowl means I can still cook my rice or beans in 7 to 15 minutes, remove the stainless bowl and present for serving, and dump and rinse out the Presto in half a minute. No chances of drying out or burning small quantities of food on the bottom of my Presto. This higher and better use of a pressure cooker comes from Miss Vickie. Her cookbook on pressure cooking is wonderful. Her advise is given freely and well thought out also (on her website). Just my observations based on implementation. Jim in So Calif

DC I have used a smaller pot in the pressure cooker for other things - and loved the results of your suggestion to pressure steam meat, with the concentrated stock that results. I never know whether to cover the inside pot or not. I have a set of three stacking SS Indian pots that fit inside my largest pressure cooker and a much larger pot that fits in as a single piece. The same flat lid fits both the stack and the single pot. So to cover or not inside the pressure cooker? I'd like to be able to successfully cook small amounts of rice this way. Getting back to the fruit, I'm not sure if there would be an overall advantage to the pot in pan method here because once you cook the peel you add all the sugar and bring it to a boil until it reaches 212 degrees, so you would still have the stickiest part in the PC. My pressure cookers have very thick laminated bottoms and burning food is not an issue. Teresa, I don't know! I used very differently shaped containers for my lemon slices and for the sugar so I'm not at all sure how the volume compares. I can tell you that a cup of white sugar weighs a little over 7 ounces so if you weighed your oranges and lemons together at the market and took off a little for the cut off ends of the fruit you would have an idea. Or if you have a scale at home and want to try this, just post the weight of the fruit and I can estimate the sugar for you. The method here is that you cook the fruit, and start with something close to double the weight of sugar, stir it in and taste, adding more sugar if you think it is not sweet enough. I was happy with just a little less than twice the weight of sugar to fruit, the recipe suggest twice the weight as a starting point. This recipe is so fast and easy that if it isn't right with a small quantity of fruit, the worst that can happen is that you end up with a syrup with pieces of peel which would certainly be good for lots of things. When I us the recipe again I'll pay more attention and let you know. Annie, you may know if most fruit preserve recipes use an equal volume of sugar and fruit. The amount that I did definitely took less than thirty minutes from washing the lemons to putting the filled jars in a HWB so not a lot time is involved to experiment. And the results are good! Lee

Bobby, I'm sure you will have a great time with Cathy on Tuesday. Kevin and I are thinking about a trip to Florida ourselves because he has a friend in Tampa he went to graduate school with, and she has been begging us to visit and stay at her house. I think it would be a nice trip, but as Gina noted before, there aren't good flights between L.A. and Tampa, and so we thought we might fly to Orlando, rent a car there, and then drive to Tampa. I have no idea when we will get around to this. I have to say that I am extremely careful about pot placement on my induction cooker, and so it is always centered in place. The PC pots are exactly the right size for this burner, and so I have not been concerned about the control buttons, but I will keep that in mind. I do love the timer, and yesterday I cooked a bunch of potatoes with some onion plus one cup of water. I closed the lid, set the cooker to #10 (highest heat) for two minutes and then turned it down to 250 degrees on the temp scale and set the timer for 10 minutes and let it go. I was waiting for sausages in the smoker, and when they were done, so were the potatoes, and oddly enough, there was no water left. I think it escaped as steam when I opened the steam valve. That was a new experience for me! So we only had potatoes and sausage last night, but we also smoked a large boneless turkey breast that I will use for sandwiches, etc. We also assembled our Big Green Egg (much more of an ordeal than we expected, partly due to insufficient/faulty instructions) and put up lights in the pergola. I can see that we will be spending a lot more time in the pergola, now that it is properly lit. I'm looking forward to cooking more things in the PC! I really like the conbination with the induction cooker, since it will turn off from the timer, and so I can sort of forget about it once it is set. Lars

I have all three as well. PC's are excellent timesavers--steamed artichokes in 12-14 minutes instead of 45. Excellent for quickly tenderizing cuts of meat. (Great curry dishes in 20 minutes.) And sometime this week I'm gonna make corned beef & cabbage in just a little more than an hour. And I find that I prefer osso buco made in the PC to the non-PC way. Also, with a PC I can make foolproof risotto with hardly any effort and very little time, so I end up making risotto more often. (Indeed, Kuhn Rikon markets a small PC as a 'risotto maker'.) Dutch ovens are great for unfussy cooking; starting something on the stovetop and then finishing them in a slow oven is their forte. If you like this technique, take a look at Molly Stevens' All About Braising. Great resource. I have found that since I got into PC cooking I don't use my slow cooker as much. Slow cookers are great for stews, chili, beans and other things where the timing isn't critical--but the pressure cooker is very good on beans and grains as well, in about a third the time. If you want to work more grains and beans into your menus, a pressure cooker really is worthwhile. Lorna Sass, the pressure cooker expert, has written a pressure cooker cookbook precisely aimed at vegetarians. (See the link.) If I had to give up any one of those gadgets, it would be the slow cooker. I definitely wouldn't give up my PC, and I really like the enameled cast iron Dutch ovens as well. Here is a link that might be useful: vegetarian pressure cooker cookbook