My One-Pot Meal

I knew tonight would be tricky because I would only have about 20 minutes to get dinner made and eaten between our various commitments, so I sagely started a soup early in the afternoon.  I had to cook the chicken first, so I decided to use the Instant Pot for that so I could also make the soup in the same pot afterwards – Yay for only using ONE pot!  I cooked the chicken, put in all the soup ingredients, turned it on “slow cooker—normal” mode and left it.

Three hours later I came back to check on it.  When I opened the top, it did not seem very hot, so I stuck in 2 different thermometers.  Both said the top few inches of the soup was only about 90 degrees!  

I immediately took the soup out of that bacteria-inviting danger-zone chamber and poured it into 2 different pots to put on the stove so I could get it boiling ASAP.  While it was heating up, I started worrying about how long it had been tepid, so I called the Instant Pot company (who was no help at all), and my 2 food safety experts (my mom and my sister), whose collective response was, “Hmmmmm…..”

I let it simmer on the stove for the next hour or so while I ran Colsen to a class, but in the end I decided not to risk poisoning all 6 of us tonight.  So in the 20 minutes I had at home for dinner, I pulled out some meager leftovers to eat, and poured the soup into smaller containers so that it would cool off quickly so I could put it in the fridge before I left for my next meeting.

My one-pot meal turned into a 5-pot disaster that we will likely never eat.

I’m sure there’s a moral to the story here somewhere, and I suppose it has something to do with me being lazy and trying to avoid extra work, but mostly my take-away is never to make soup in the Instant Pot on slow-cooker mode.