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I'm considering the purchase of a pressure cooker and would like input about A) who here uses one and would you consider it a good investment? and B) any recommendations for a cookbook on the topic?

I'm a busy working Mom so I'm thinking this would be a good tool to speed up meal preparation, especially on those days when I didn't plan ahead and have no idea what's for dinner.  I'm thinking that maybe owning a pressure cooker would cut down on those trips for carry out food.

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Lorna Sass's Pressure Perfect is an excellent intro to pressure cooking, and she will make you comfortable with the process right away.  It is an amazing time saver.  Be sure to get a stainless steel, not aluminium, cooker.  Macys often has the Spanish brand Fagor on sale.

Lorna Sass's Cooking Under Pressure (Wm Morrow, 1989, 2009) was her first pressure cooking book and certainly a classic, but her later Pressure Perfect (Wm Morrow, 2004) is the one to get.  She had learned all kinds of new tricks by the time she wrote Pressure Perfect.

Lorna's absolutely sound on methods, but her palate is a little bland.  For deliciousness, turn to Victoria Wise's The Pressure Cooker Gourmet (Harvard Common Press, 2005).  I don't know why Victoria isn't tremendously famous -- not one of her books is indexed yet.  She has tremendous breadth and a perfect-pitch sense of recipe construction.  Give her a try, you'll love her.

[How do I put my picture up, the way you guys have?  When I look at my Profile information I don't see uploading a picture anywhere.]

You can add a picture or logo by posting it at gravatar.  The image will then follow you wherever you post on different forums that allow images.

Unfortunately Victoria Wise's book isn't owned by many EYB members yet so isn't high up our indexing list.  Perhaps if enough people read your recommendation and buy the book, it will go shooting up the chart.

BTW, to add links for the books just highlight the book title then click the link icon, third from the right and then paste in the link.  You do need to have EYB open in another tab to be able to copy the links over, or assemble all the links you want in a text file such as Wordpad and copy them over.  I've done it for the books you mentioned in your post.

I ran across a whole bunch of people on a plant based food group that swear by a piece of equipment called an Instant Pot.  It's available on Amazon.  It's a multi use kitchen machine (7-in-1 Multi-Functional Cooker--Pressure Cooker, Slow Cooker, Rice Cooker, Saute/Browning, Yogurt Maker, Steamer & Warmer.  The 6 in 1 is $20-40 cheaper, but doesn't make yogurt).