I love my instant pot. My favorite recipe is red beans and rice. My mother-in-law is Cajun from down on the bayou and this was one that I adapted from hers. Happy to post it if anyone is interested. It makes enough for about 6-8 one-bowl meals and freezes wonderfully, so you can always have a quick meal ready in a pinch. Takes about 10 minutes of prep and an hour to cook.
I originally bought mine for pork butt, it makes doing pulled pork super easy as you have to use spoons to get it out because it falls apart that easily. Then I found it made chicken thighs incredibly easy to cook to fall-off-the-bone. I did a smaller beef roast in there too once and the meat was more tender and moist than in the oven and was done in 1/4 of the time.
Last year I transitioned to 95%~ whole food plant based eating and used it a ton for black beans (I've since switched to low sodium canned black beans just for convenience) and now every 3 days I cook a bunch of peeled potatoes and baby carrots in it for my lunches.
I put in some water, hit the broil button to pre-heat the water and peel my potatoes. By the time I'm done peeling the potatoes and have dumped the baby carrots in the water is boiling and I go ahead and set it to manual for 16 minutes and put the lid on. 20-25 minutes later it beeps and I manually vent the valve and get my meal prep containers out, fill them up, 30-40 seconds to clean the pot and I've got lunch for three days. It's great!
The IP is pretty overrated. I have one and use it really often, but it has serious limitations that fad blogs just kind of ignore. Like, it's not really a huge time saver because it's low pressure and takes so long to come to pressure anyway. Also, pressure cooked meat is very often gross and spongy, so you should use it as a slow cooker in those situations.
It's great for rice, beans, sauce & soup bases. Plus, it doesn't heat up the house in the summer. But I think it's limitations make it a poor suggestion for a novice cook.
> pressure cooked meat is very often gross and spongy
I haven't cooked much beef in it that hasn't become part of a stew, but my experience cooking chicken and turkey is that it comes out incredibly juicy and flavorful. Even better if you have the air fryer/convection add on. I've done turkey in it for the past several years for potlucks and family meals and it always gets rave reviews. For beef, part of the appeal was that I could brown it, saute aromatics, and then cook it in the same pot.
