[Instant Pot] Tortellini Soup with Sausage & Greens

This hearty Instant Pot tortellini soup recipe is made with crumbles of Italian sausage and fresh leafy greens in a savory tomato broth.

You know you want to enjoy spoonfuls of tender, cheesy pasta puffs – and this recipe is the best way to turn them into a balanced one-pot weeknight meal with protein and plenty of veggies.

Take advantage of your electric pressure cooker to make quick work of dry tortellini pasta and marry all of the flavors together into the perfect soup you’ve been dreaming about!

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[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. 

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

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!Β 

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!

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[Instant Pot] Broccoli Cheddar Soup

Cozy comfort food – it’s what I need right now! This creamy soup is made from roasted broccoli, real sharp cheddar cheese, and an earthy-sweet foundation of onions, carrots and celery. It’s also enriched (in both the culinary and nutritional sense) with a healthy dose of hemp seeds, which blend into a creamy texture without any need to add actual cream.

Reflecting on my favorite soup recipes, it’s hard not to notice a pattern: there are a lot of creamy soups made with roasted vegetables. Why? First, because roasting makes vegetables delicious! Second, because it reflects an efficiency in my food-prep workflow. If it’s the weekend and I’m heating up my oven to cook dinner or bake anything, I always try to double-down and bake or roast several foods in that single session. It saves time and energy, and it’s always handy to have extra roasted veggies on hand. 

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[Instant Pot] Double Decker Saag Paneer + Cauliflower Rice

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!Β 

I love paneer – it’s a fresh non-melting cheese common in Indian cuisine, uniquely made without salt or rennet. To make it, milk is simply cooked with an acidic ingredient like lemon juice; when the curds precipitate from the whey, they are gathered and pressed into a firm block.

This recipe is my favorite way to eat paneer: the rich, chewy, cheesy cubes are seasoned, crisped, and tucked into this classic curry of creamed greens. I like to serve it with a bed of steamed cauliflower rice – this extra helping of veggies pairs well with the rich curry sauce, and leaves room for a side of bread if desired (I am still working on perfecting my homemade sourdough naan… If you’re interested in that recipe, speak up in the comments to move it up a notch on my priority list!)

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[Instant Pot] 50 Clove Garlic & White Bean Soup

Garlic lovers only! Fifty whole cloves – half roasted until deeply caramelized, half left sharply raw before pressure-cooking – make this soup very powerful.

Because this recipe is made with hardy produce that stays available through the cold season, it is an excellent candidate to accompany your winter grilled cheese sandwiches after your freezer supply of Roasted Tomato Soup runs out. Instant Pot makes it easy to pressure-cook garlic, onion, herbs, broth, and soaked dry white beans into a creamy, fiery, satisfying soup.

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[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!

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[Instant Pot] Loaded Potato & Cauliflower Soup

This is what I felt compelled to cook this week when, for the first time in my life, I got SNOWED IN. The three feet of snow that fell on my yard last Saturday came as a bit of a surprise – the forecasts predicted only a fraction of what arrived that day, and they also didn’t tell me it was going to keep dumping more all week. Can’t say I ever expected to see that happen this first winter in our new home on the Olympic Peninsula, famously one of the sunniest places in the Pacific Northwest which historically averages only 2 inches of snow annually. Out of my element, I set up camp in the kitchen.

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[Instant Pot] Roasted Tomato Soup

Ever think about using your Instant Pot to transform fresh tomatoes into soup? Think about it! I gave it a shot for the first time this Summer, and the results blew me away: rich, velvety, and intensely flavorful.

Ever wonder why so many recipes tell you to remove the seeds and skins from tomatoes? I avoid that step whenever I can, and not just because it’s annoying…

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[Instant Pot] Julia Child’s French Onion Soup

Onion soup! A mid-winter wonder in which humble beginnings are conjured into something magically nourishing. Like many cooks, I cannot bear for my onion soup to stray too far from the classic… but I did want to involve my pressure cooker, so I’m sharing my methods for anyone else interested in another Julia-fueled Instant Pot adventure.

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[Instant Pot] Korean BBQ Beef Roast + Ssam

I was never really exposed to Korean food growing up in Florida, but I learned to LOVE it after moving to San Diego. I lived and worked near the Convoy district, the city’s great wonderland of pan-Asian cuisine, and that’s where Korean barbecue stole my heart. Sweet, salty, garlicky, fragrant with toasted sesame oil, utterly addictive – especially when devoured ssam-style, in lettuce wraps piled with rice and lots of kimchi.

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[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!

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[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?

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[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 unassumingΒ yellow dalΒ bookmarked from Smitten Kitchen. I made this recipe for the first time in college, justΒ 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!

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[Instant Pot] Greek Vegetable Soup

A funny thing happened on the way to writing this post. We’re only here talking about this soup today because two months ago on RD Day, I took the opportunity to scope out a list of fellow RD bloggers. On one of the many links I clicked, I came across a giveaway raffle and entered on a whim. And out of the zillion entries, I actually won! That day I gained an awesome new Mediterranean cookbook, and my first glimpse into what has become one of my new favorite RD blogs, Zen and Spice by the talented Emily Hein. This girl inspires me to live right! If you’re like me and love cooking/eating beautiful whole foods, growing some of them yourself, and generally taking a mindful and appreciative approach to it all, you should definitely check it out!

The book that I won in the giveaway is Eating the Greek Way, by Dr. Fedon Alexander Lindberg. Emily mentioned that this is one of her favorite cookbooks, and I can totally see why. The book features gorgeous photos and recipes featuring the kind of simple but perfect food I can imagine being served up in Mediterranean kitchens on real life weeknights. And now in my kitchen too! On my weeknights! Life is grand.

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[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.

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