Ingredients
Method
- Rinse the rice well, and let soak in cool water while you prep the other ingredients, or for at least 25-30 minutes. Basmati cooks up much nicer if it is soaked, but see the notes for adjustments in case you prefer to cook without the soaking.
- Start the pressure cooker on the Brown/Saute LOW setting. Add oil and butter to the inner pot.
- Lightly season the cut chicken with the seasoned salt of your choice, and mix so it's well covered.
- Saute onions until softening and just starting to brown around the edges, stirring occasionally. Add garlic and ginger, plus the whole spices. Stir more often, and let everything cook for a couple of minutes until it gets fragrant..
- Add the chicken, and fry stirring occasionally until it has a cooked surface all over and is starting to brown a little.
- Stir in the ground spices. Continue to cook, stirring, for another minute or so.
- Pour in the liquid, and add any additional bouillon, etc.--plus around 0.5 teaspoon extra salt if you're not already using salty broth or bouillon. Add in drained rice and chickpeas, and gently stir to combine so that all the rice is submerged.
- Distribute frozen vegetables over the top.
- Pressure cook on "Manual", HIGH (which should be the default pressure setting) for 5 minutes.
- Let the pot sit to natural release the pressure for 10 minutes before opening the valve.
- Gently fluff the finished rice to combine the ingredients, and let sit uncovered to rest and steam off for a few minutes before serving. Adjust salt to taste.
- Enjoy, with whatever optional garnishes you prefer!
Notes
Prepping the alliums and ginger. I used two onions roughly that size, and half the "one single large clove" variety bulb of garlic. The other half is also minced, and waiting in the freezer now.
If you prefer not to soak the rice before cooking, increase the liquid to 1.25x the volume of rice, or 375ml/1.5 cup plus a tablespoon or two for this amount of rice.
If you would prefer to pressure cook dry beans rather than using canned, here are excellent directions plus can equivalents over at Spice Cravings. That's my own go-to quick reference now. I generally like to pressure cook larger batches at a time, and freeze what I don't use in rough can sized amounts for later use.
Today, I just pressure cooked this around 150ml/⅔ cup of chickpeas in 500ml water with ⅓ teaspoon of salt. 45 minutes unsoaked on "Manual" HIGH was just about perfect in our somewhat hard water to get them nicely soft but not falling apart.
Frozen peas and carrots are a good choice some places. There is the similar vegetable mix in the UK which also includes corn kernels and chopped sweet red pepper. Here, for similar applications I like to use some multicolored carrot-heavy budget "Wokmix", with any broccoli or water chestnuts removed back to the bag. Today I also wanted peas. One major drawback to this particular blend in here, is that the yellow carrots visually blend in with the turmeric making the results less colorful.
We are basically just wanting convenient smallish pieces of vegetables which will stand up to this pressure cooking time. I would avoid broccoli or cauliflower, unless you want them falling-apart mushy.