Instant Pot Healthy Dinner Recipes

[Instant Pot] Insta-Chicken! Pressure Cooker Chicken Breast

Original publish date July 10, 2015. Updated 2023 with expanded information.

It’s true: with Instant Pot, chicken breasts can magically transform into the world’s most effortless healthy dinner! This is the ultimate guide to pressure cooking chicken breasts. I have cooked many, many chicken breasts in the 8 years that I’ve been using my electric pressure cooker – frozen and fresh, from extra-large to tiny tenderloins, and everything in between.

Let your Instant Pot make it easier than ever to turn chicken into a healthy meal prep staple. Fuel up with lean protein that the whole family will enjoy – paleo, keto and gluten-free eaters included.

[Instant Pot] Easy Vegetable Curry

Original publish date September 25, 2014. Updated 2023 with expanded information.

This Instant Pot Vegetable Curry is a simple, healthy dinner that will fill you up with plant-powered nutrition. A mountain of mixed veggies, warm spices and creamy coconut milk make this a quick meal that will nourish your whole family – vegan and gluten free eaters included.

A curry spice blend peppered with cinnamon and nutmeg creates an aromatic curry that transports my appetite to a steamy West Indian or Caribbean kitchen. You will crave it and cook it again and again!

[Instant Pot] Chicken Spaghetti

Instant Pot Chicken Spaghetti! This recipe is flat-out the quickest way to whip up a weeknight dinner version of the familiar favorite southern casserole dish.

This one-pot meal for your pressure cooker is creamy, cheesy, comfort food – and made from simple, wholesome ingredients too!

[Instant Pot] Jerk Chicken

Homestyle Jamaican jerk chicken: make it faster and easier than ever with your pressure cooker!

This is the BEST jerk chicken because the flavor is built from all fresh, healthy ingredients – hot peppers, ginger, garlic, fresh herbs and spices – and like magic, Instant Pot gets those flavors SO deeply infused into the tender, juicy chicken.

[Instant Pot] Picadillo: Cuban Style Ground Beef

Picadillo! A Latin American classic, and a sublimely simple dinner to whip up with your Instant Pot. In a pressure cooker, you can achieve slow-cooked flavor in a fraction of the time. It only takes a pack of ground meat, a few chopped veggies, and a couple of basic pantry staple seasonings to fix up a meal that satisfies my chronic cravings for Cuban food.

What is picadillo? Through the lens of American cuisine, you could think of it as a sort of chili, stew or hash… But simply, it’s a dish of ground meat sauteed with onions, peppers and seasonings. Different cooks make it all kinds of different ways, but I’ll walk you through my personal favorite take – inspired by the Cuban-style recipes I’ve become addicted to, thanks to the years I lived in Miami.

[Instant Pot] Double Decker Korean Sesame Beef + Zoodles

Double Decker Dinner is a personal favorite Instant Pot recipe theme, all about finding the right combination of foods that pair together as a balanced meal and that can be stacked and cooked at the same time in the same pressure cooker. It’s one-pot wonderful!

Using your Instant Pot to cook zucchini noodles is handy. It’s even handier when you can cook everything you need to round out a balanced meal all at the same time!

These zoodles resemble classic Korean japchae noodles, dressed up with a spicy-sweet sauce, ground beef, extra veggies and a flourish of toasty sesame seeds.

[Instant Pot] Saucy Chicken Tinga

Tinga de pollo! In Mexican cuisine, this means shredded chicken, braised in a sauce made with chipotle chilies, tomato and onion. It’s savory, spicy, smoky, and deliciously saucy. It makes incredible tacos, and this year I used it as the star filling in one of my family’s favorite festive holiday traditions: our annual Tamale Party, fueled by Instant Pot!

[Instant Pot] Insta-Spaghetti!

This recipe is one of my go-to lazy-cook dinners – especially helpful right now while I’ve been learning how to manage dinnertime with a newborn baby in the house! My back-pocket beef & veggie bolognese is lovingly known as “insta-spaghetti”, and while it’s not the same as your all-day ‘Sunday Sauce’ fancy bolognese affair, it is a filling, nourishing, very easy comfort food dish. The recipe combines grass-fed ground beef, lots of chopped mixed vegetables, canned tomatoes and whole-wheat pasta – all in one pressure cooker.

[Instant Pot] Freezer Meals: 5 Favorite Make-Ahead Healthy Dinner Recipes

As I waddled through the third trimester of my first pregnancy, my attention turned toward strategies for make-ahead meal prep and easy-cooking plans to keep myself well-fed this winter when my life turned happily upside-down!

That’s right… the time has come for us to dish about Instant Pot Freezer Meals! As part of my post-partum food prep strategy, I embarked on a little project to store a lineup of five of my favorite freezer-friendly pressure cooker dinners. Today I’m here to share what I’ve learned along the way – and all of the recipes too, of course!

[Instant Pot] Double Decker Coffee Pot Roast + Butternut Mash

I’ve been told that my grandmother cooked a famously aromatic pot roast made with coffee. Unfortunately nobody knows the recipe, so I imagined how I would like it to taste. Deeply savory, slightly bitter but countered with natural sweetness from onions, enhanced with thyme and bay leaf, and finished with a touch of syrupy acidity from aged balsamic vinegar. I gave it a shot, and it was love at first bite. Now, I am here to make sure nobody loses this recipe!

[Instant Pot] Double Decker Cheesy Taco-Stuffed Peppers + Quinoa

It’s Double Decker Dinner Time! My favorite kind of one-pot wonderful balanced meal – there’s just something so satisfying about stacking and cooking two foods in one Instant Pot.

This easy recipe begins by using Instant Pot to saute a mix of seasoned grass-fed ground beef taco meat with chopped veggies. We stuff as much as we can into split bell peppers, arranged on a steamer basket – and whatever doesn’t fit is left in the pot and joined by a cup of quinoa. Both layers cook together in just one minute pressure-cooking time!

[Instant Pot] Double Decker Chicken Marsala + Parmesan Polenta

Today, we make a long overdue return to Double-Decker Dinners! This pressure-cooker recipe theme is all about finding the right combination of foods that compliment each other to round out a satisfying meal, and also happen to harmoniously take the same amount of time to cook together in my Instant Pot. This challenge never fails to pique my culinary imagination, so stay tuned – more experiments are in the works.

[Instant Pot] Sundubu Jjigae: Korean Spicy Soft Tofu Stew

When I start cooking Korean food, I have a hard time stopping. Mostly because when I bring home a bucket of kimchi, I want it on EVERYTHING.

The last recipe I posted (Korean BBQ Beef Roast) is an old favorite in my house. After writing that up, I decided to finally tackle a new dish that I’ve been scheming to cook ever since first trying it in a restaurant a few months ago: sundubu jjigae!

[Instant Pot] Double Decker Coq Au Vin + Garlic Mashed Potatoes

Bonjour, my friends. To begin this month’s pressure-cooking extravaganza (Insta-Pot-tober??), let’s kick off with something special: it’s French, it’s fancy, and it’s a double-decker one-pot wonder:

Layer 1 is the classic French braise featuring chicken, bacon, wine, vegetables & mushrooms: coq au vin. (ooh la la!)

Layer 2 is a basket full of quartered potatoes and whole garlic cloves, which happen to steam to mashable perfection in the same pressure-cooking time as your main course. (sacre bleu!!)

See category: Double Decker Dinners!

[Instant Pot] Chicken Mushroom & Wild Rice Soup

“#1. Make a Lot of Soup”

This was the first directive scribbled to myself on a note titled “Foodprep Strategy,” a deliberate attempt at eating well and staying sane in this time of post-moving–new-life-upheaval. New year, new city, new kitchen, new climate, new grocery stores, new work-from-home transition, all around brand new routine.

In my disoriented state, emerging from a maze of cardboard boxes to hit the ground running as Dinner Captain once again, I turned to soup. Nourishing, crowd-pleasing, inexpensive, efficient to cook in large batches, quick to reheat, and warming for cold bellies… soup has been serving me well.

[Instant Pot] Ropa Vieja: Cuban Shredded Beef Stew

Ropa vieja. Be still, my heart.

While I was studying to become a dietitian, I lived in Miami for three years. Moving to Miami can cause some serious culture shock, even for a Florida native, but I have to admit that crazy town has some perks.

Some of the best perks were getting to know Cuban friends and their Cuban FOOD. In Miami, I met some of the world’s nicest people who got me very well acquainted with Cuba’s rich culinary traditions. Cafecitos. Maduros. Picadillo. Pastelitos. And one of my personal favorites, ropa vieja, a classic comfort food that makes you feel at home whether you grew up eating it or not. It’s a flavorful stew made with peppers, tomatoes, and flank steak cooked low-and-slow until the meat is tender enough to effortlessly pull apart into long shreds that resemble the fibers of threadbare cloth, hence the name (ropa vieja = old clothes).

[Instant Pot] Chipotle Chocolate Chili

I’ve never competed in a chili cook-off, but if I did, this is the contender I would bring to the ring.

Since spying the recipe in an issue of Cooking Light years ago, it’s been a go-to for me and for Grant. I have to give him credit, as he’s taken the recipe on as his specialty – he really makes a mean pot of chili! And as much as I love to cook, there’s something extra-tasty about a home-cooked meal where somebody else does the home-cooking, you know?

[Instant Pot] Everyday Lentil & Spinach Dal

These days I do most of my recipe-clipping on Pinterest, but I still have a recipe folder on my browser’s bookmarks bar dating back from the days before ‘pinning’ was a household term (shocking, I know). The heart of the collection is a sub-folder marked “Tried and True,” which holds those special recipes that I’ve come back to again and again… the keepers! Along with the formula behind killer pumpkin garlic knots, this folder is also home to an unassuming yellow dal bookmarked from Smitten Kitchen. I made this recipe for the first time in college, just starting to dip my toes into Indian cooking, and I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve served it up since then!

This dish has been a dinner staple in my house for a lot of reasons. For one, the recipe is really straightforward, easy enough to commit to memory. It’s also super inexpensive. I do my best to cook with economy and grace, and these tasty lentils make it easy: all of the budget-friendly benefits of dried beans, but with no soaking needed. It’s a hearty vegetarian (easily vegan) source of protein – about 14 grams per serving, before the yogurt garnish. And those healthy legumes are filled out with plenty of vegetables and nutritious spices. I’ve been putting more focus on anti-inflammatory foods in my diet lately, and the turmeric, cumin, coriander, cayenne and garlic in this recipe all offer functional health benefits to reduce inflammation in the body. This is definitely an example of getting your flavor from real food, and this enticing combination is so nutritious that it’s practically medicinal!

[Instant Pot] Tamale Party!

Update December 22, 2021: This recipe is now available in Web Story format with video instructions! You can view it here.

Cinco de Mayo is coming up – and while I don’t exactly have a vested interest in commemorating the military victories of our neighbors to the south, I will take any excuse to appreciate delicious Mexican food.

I absolutely love tamales, and from the moment I first read about steaming them in a pressure cooker via this epic Mexican feast on hippressurecooking, I’ve been eager to try out a big batch in my Instant Pot.

Basically… excuse to eat Mexican food + excuse to play with Instant Pot = TAMALE PARTY, AMIGOS.

[Instant Pot] Chicken Tortilla Soup

Today I’m pulling through on my promise to share my successes with Instant Pot, my new electric pressure cooker (you can read more about my pressure-cooking obsession here). It’s been a revolutionary addition to my kitchen, but unfortunately for my readers its major role has been to constantly churn out oatmeal, rice, beans, and other essential staples too boring to blog about. But my favorite appliance is so much more than that! So I’m glad I finally got my act together to write up a recipe that puts Instant Pot in the spotlight.

But if you’re not into pressure-cooking, that’s no reason to pass over this recipe. I’ve been making this soup for years before I got wacky about pressurizing my foods. The flavors develop just as well after a simmer on the stovetop, and the process is still totally easy for a weeknight.