CHICAGO — Like a lot of people, Chandra Ram got an Instant Pot because of peer pressure. “I’m not a gadget person by any stretch of the imagination,” says Ram. “I live in Chicago, so I don’t have room for a bunch of things.” But friends kept telling her how useful the device was, and she eventually relented.
Ram already knew how to cook. She graduated from the Culinary Institute of America, worked as a restaurant consultant for years and currently serves as the editor of the food magazine Plate. She even recently co-authored the cookbook “Korean BBQ” with chef Bill Kim. But because she was so busy all the time, she felt her home cooking had slacked off a bit. “I would often come home from work, and I felt like I was half- – -ing it,” says Ram.
When she got the Instant Pot, the first recipe she tried was the butter chicken recipe from Urvashi Pitre’s extremely popular, and Tribune-approved, “Indian Instant Pot Cookbook.” “I took one bite and said, ‘This really does taste like it has been cooking all day,'” says Ram. In other words, she was hooked.
What she wasn’t expecting was that the Instant Pot would help her connect with the food of her father. Ram is a first-generation American, born to an Indian father and an Irish mother. She was raised in Lexington, Ky., where she always felt slightly out of step. “We didn’t grow up in a 100 percent Indian household,” explains Ram. “So I couldn’t hang out with all the Indian kids, because I didn’t speak the language. But I wasn’t white enough to hang with the other kids.”