Winstead Wandering

Prone to Wander

Easy Instant Pot Baked Beans

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With a perfect balance of sweet, spicy, and smoky, Easy Instant Pot Baked Beans will be your new favorite side dish for every cookout and picnic.

With a perfect balance of sweet, spicy, and smoky, Easy Instant Pot Baked Beans will be your new favorite side dish for every cookout and picnic.

As a food blogger, I take nearly any available opportunity to test out recipes on people other than family. That’s why I recently volunteered to make baked beans for the hospitality room at the district basketball tournament at the high school. I knew right away I’d be making Easy Instant Pot Baked Beans.

With no soaking necessary, these guys are the perfect balance of sweet and smoky and spicy. Though there’s little work required, the end result is a batch of beans that taste like they’ve simmering all.day.long. It’s not hard to see why this will quickly become your go-to baked beans recipe.

With a perfect balance of sweet, spicy, and smoky, Easy Instant Pot Baked Beans will be your new favorite side dish for every cookout and picnic.

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Easy Instant Pot Seasoned Chicken

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Did you know you can make Easy Instant Pot Seasoned Chicken? It’s great for eating as-is, but it’s also wonderful for using in recipes or freezing for later!

Did you know you can make Easy Instant Pot Seasoned Chicken? It's great for eating as-is, but it's also wonderful for using in recipes or freezing for later!

It took me a long time — like, nearly a year — to really find a groove with my Instant Pot. I just didn’t take the time to figure it out. Even during that time, though, I was still using it regularly to make chicken.

We eat a lot of shredded chicken. While we rarely have it as a main dish, I use it often as a condiment of sorts, an ingredient in our meal, like these Baked Green Chile Chicken Taquitos. You’ll almost always find a container of seasoned shredded chicken in our fridge for use in recipes or just for whipping up a chicken and cheese quesadilla.

You might also like: Honey Balsamic Chicken Marinade

In the last year, all of that chicken has been prepared in the Instant Pot. Here’s the beauty of Easy Instant Pot Seasoned Chicken: it’s easy (I know, I said that already), it’s flavorful, it’s fast, and it’s totally customizable. I love that I don’t have to tend the chicken like I would if it was cooking on the stovetop, and it’s ready much faster than if I baked it. The pressure-cooking of the Instant Pot seals in the flavor, and I swap out spices to develop any profile I’d like.

Did you know you can make Easy Instant Pot Seasoned Chicken? It's great for eating as-is, but it's also wonderful for using in recipes or freezing for later!

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Easy Instant Pot Macaroni and Cheese

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If you aren’t using your Instant Pot to experience the creamy, cheesy, gooey goodness of Easy Instant Pot Macaroni and Cheese, what are you even doing with your life?

If you aren't using your Instant Pot to experience the creamy, cheesy, gooey goodness of Easy Instant Pot Macaroni and Cheese, what are you even doing with your life?

I remember the moment I knew I was in love with J. It was my freshman year in college, sometime in the fall after we’d talked on the phone every day during the summer and spent the first semester of school hanging out on campus. I remember texting him often during those months (from my camera-less flip phone because this was 2005), saying things like, “I really like you.” It hadn’t occurred to me yet that I more than liked him.

You might also like: Creamy Sausage Macaroni & Cheese

And then one day I headed to the mail room to check my tiny mailbox. I don’t even remember if I had mail that day, but I do know I was leaving the building because I was headed up the stairs that led back to the center of campus and toward my dorm. I had my phone out, texting J, and I tripped on the stairs. That part doesn’t have anything to do with my epiphany; I tripped at least once on every set of stairs on campus. But sometime during that walk from the mail room back to my dorm, I thought, “I think I love this guy.”

If you aren't using your Instant Pot to experience the creamy, cheesy, gooey goodness of Easy Instant Pot Macaroni and Cheese, what are you even doing with your life?

What does all this have to do with Easy Instant Pot Macaroni and Cheese? Not much, really, except I’m writing this on Valentine’s Day (busy few weeks + blog issues =  tight post turnaround) so I’m feeling a little mushy. Also, even though there are a ton of things J and I don’t have in common — he loves Top 40 music and I’m all about 90’s/early 00’s hip hop; he loves sci-fi, action, and comic book movies, while I want light and happy; he’s an incredibly picky eater, but I’m more adventurous — macaroni and cheese is something we agree on. We both love the stuff, including this super simple recipe.

You might also like: Five Cheese Macaroni & Cheese

If you’ve never made homemade macaroni and cheese, this recipe is the perfect place to start. It doesn’t require you to make any cheese sauces, and it certainly doesn’t call for any of that neon processed cheese junk (I love a good helping of Rotel Dip as much as the next Southerner, but please keep that fake stuff away from my mac ‘n’ cheese). The Instant Pot does all the noodle-boiling work, and they don’t even need to be drained. Just add the cheese and other ingredients to the cooked noodles, stir everything together, and everyone will think you spent a ton of time making a mouthwatering side dish.

If you aren't using your Instant Pot to experience the creamy, cheesy, gooey goodness of Easy Instant Pot Macaroni and Cheese, what are you even doing with your life?

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Instant Pot Mashed Red Potatoes

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Be the dinnertime hero by whipping up these Instant Pot Mashed Red Potatoes: the creamy, quick, flavorful version of everybody’s favorite side dish.

Be the dinnertime hero by whipping up these Instant Pot Mashed Red Potatoes: the creamy, quick, flavorful version of everybody’s favorite side dish.

I had my wisdom teeth removed (I only had three) the summer before my junior year of college. I was living in an apartment with friends, taking a summer class and feeling very much like a grown-up. Since I was 3000 miles away from my family, J drove me to the oral surgeon’s office on the big day.

The only thing I remember about being in the office is coming to when surgery was over. I was in that haze between sleep and wakefulness, but I remember clearly hearing the conversation between two nurses. Then one of them said to me, “Abby, you need to keep your eyes open.” And I replied, “I thought they were.”

You might also like: Oven-Roasted Potatoes with Bacon and Cheese

We stopped on the way home for a chocolate milkshake, but it kept running out of my mouth, so we went through the KFC drive-thru for an order of mashed potatoes. If I had any love for that place before our visit (spoiler alert: I didn’t; there was no love.), those bland, watery mashed potatoes would have squashed it. Luckily, my mouth was still numb enough that I could choke them down.

Which brings us to these Instant Pot Mashed Red Potatoes. Y’all, those nasty fast food “potatoes” don’t even deserve to share a name with this recipe. These guys are perfectly chunky in the best sort of rustic way. They’re creamy without being bland, flavorful without losing their potato-ness.

Basically, they’re everything mashed potatoes should be and you need to make them now.

Be the dinnertime hero by whipping up these Instant Pot Mashed Red Potatoes: the creamy, quick, flavorful version of everybody’s favorite side dish.

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Instant Pot Refried Beans

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Forget the can, and forget sweating over a hot stove. Instant Pot Refried Beans have that smooth restaurant-style texture you love, with the perfect hint of spice.

Forget the can, and forget sweating over a hot stove. Instant Pot Refried Beans have that smooth restaurant-style texture you love, with the perfect hint of spice.

It all started with a bag of frozen Green Chile Chicken Taquitos. Two bags, actually. We had two bags, 14 taquitos in total, in the freezer at church. They were too old to give to people (“Congratulations on the birth of your baby! Here’s a bag of slightly freezer-burnt taquitos to help you out.”), but not too old to feed to the Wednesday night crowd.

14 taquitos wouldn’t be enough to feed everyone, of course, so I volunteered to make more. I volunteered before I was told just how many more would be. 100+, as it turns out. By that point I was all in, though, so I brainstormed a side dish, too. I’ve been making slow cooker refried beans for ages, so I knew immediately I had to replicate that recipe for the instant pot.

I’m used to having beans cooking all day when I make them in the slow cooker; it was so nice to have these guys ready in a fraction of the time, with the added bonus of not needing to stir them occasionally. The group at church Wednesday nights is mostly kids, so I wasn’t sure how refried beans would go over, but they were a hit! Several of the kids came back for seconds. At the end of the night, there hardly any left in the pot.

Forget the can, and forget sweating over a hot stove. Instant Pot Refried Beans have that smooth restaurant-style texture you love, with the perfect hint of spice.

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