When my husband Dave got an Instant Pot pressure cooker for Christmas in 2018, I was especially excited to use it, considering how traditional cooking isn’t exactly my strong suit. For a few years, this appliance was doing almost all the work in our kitchen. Since Dave worked in-office at the time and I worked from home, I could prepare meals early in the day and keep an eye on it, or even get something started just before dinner time.
Since soup has always been a year-round staple for me (yes, even on hot summer days!), I’d typically make a soup or stew in the Instant Pot when I could. In 2020, however, a new kitchen essential entered our lives and led us to parting ways with our once-beloved Instant Pot.
What Made Me Finally Get Rid of My Instant Pot
Then came the pandemic lockdown, and we were both cooking for… every single meal. Since both of us were working from home and cooking all of our food, the way we cooked started to change. My husband is a great cook — and actually enjoys it — and since he was home during the day, he’d do a lot more of the cooking than before. He didn’t use the Instant Pot as much because when he used it, he said there wasn’t as much of a sense of accomplishment and creativity when creating a meal. It didn’t take long for our Instant Pot to start collecting dust, making room for the beloved blue Lodge enameled Dutch oven we got in 2020.
The Dutch oven became our go-to for soups, stews, pastas, and one-pot meals like chicken and rice — basically all the recipes we used our Instant Pot for. When we moved into our current apartment two years ago, I still didn’t want to part ways with our Instant Pot despite not having used it for nearly four years at that point. But this past fall, we decided it was time to finally let it go. I listed it on Facebook Marketplace, and it was gone in a matter of days to someone who would, hopefully, use it more often.
Our Instant Pot fed us well and saved us time for a couple of years, but we ultimately adapted to a different tool better suited to our changed lives. It had been useful, but it was extremely bulky in our small kitchen. After getting rid of it, we instantly gained a ton of cabinet storage space that’s perfect for our paper towel back stock. Plus, the Dutch oven isn’t just extremely versatile and easy to use (sans multistep features), but it actually looks good sitting out in our kitchen. Talk about functional decor!
