Quick Release – a newbie’s perspective

My first meal in my IP yesterday was the whole tasty chicken that I brutalized. Still not certain if any group is going to come after me for abusing the corpse but so far so good. Thank you for all of your tips and tricks in that post! You made me feel confident enough to press on! Today I went for the Egg Roll in a Bowl recipe. I was feeling pretty proud as I figured out to be patient when you push the saute button and wait for it to display “hot”. Whoo hoo I got this! I threw in my ground pork and me, being the eager beaver, threw in my spices and soy sauce substitute. Well darn. Now I had spices and soy substitute forming a lovely rue on the bottom of my pan. This would have been perfect had I been making country sausage gravy but no. I worked as much as I could back onto the meat and just chalked that up as a learning experience. The recipe called to set the IP at 0 minutes. Hmmm…seemed like sorcery to me but alrighty, I set that bad boy to 0. I stared at my IP for several minutes waiting for whatever magic it was going to do and finally, I went to sit down to pratice my patience. When it beeped, I jumped up to see that indeed it had come to pressure. I went back and sat down for a moment and ruminated over the whole 0 minutes thing. Another beep! This was the moment that I had to do a quick release and I must say that I was a bit intimidated by it. Armed with my long-handled wooden spoon, I stepped as far away as I possibly could while stretching out my arm until the tip of my wooden spoon just reached the valve, sorta like the Warrier 2 yoga pose. I slid the valve over and I must admit I wasn’t quite ready as it made this loud psssshhshhhh sound that caused me to jump back into the corner of my kitchen still clinging tightly to my wooden spoon as though there was an intruder in my house and I was going to have to take care of business. Steam flowed out of this thing like Mt St Helen’s was erupting and it seemed to go on forever, most likely only a minute or two, but it was the kind of minute or two that reminded me of being in labor where you think like 3 hours have passed. I yelled to whomever was listening in my house, “Dear God, it is still going!” When the steam finally stopped, and the little pin dropped, I made another announcement to anyone within ear shot, “I am going to remove the lid now!” What I was really implying was that if it didn’t end well, this was my final goodbye. I slowly opened the lid hoping that I had done everything correctly and peeked inside…..perfection! I am sold!