Welcome to the Instant Pot club! :awe:
Here's some good resources:
http://www.reddit.com/r/instantpotsmart/comments/2pwegn/good_user_communities/
I have the IPS Bluetooth model (lets you program it from your phone). Which model did you go with? I think there's the 6-in-1, 7-in-1, and Smart models available right now. I just got mine for Christmas, so I'm pretty new to it as well. Some notes:
1. Makes great rice. That was actually what sold me on it: a friend made brown rice and it was actually edible! Usually brown rice is on the fairly meh side, but it comes out nice & fluffy in the rice cooker! One neat trick is to mix in a tablespoon of tumeric powder with the brown rice to give it a really nice golden-yellow color.
2. Beans of all kinds are good in this, and you can cook dry beans in like 40 minutes, no soaking required. Beans, lentils, chickpeas, whatever. Great for chili, hummus, refried beans, and so on.
3. Hummus is awesome, especially if you have a good blender or food processor. You can buy dry chickpeas in bulk & just make it whenever you want, super fresh & creamy. Nom nom nom.
4. These are the two main books I reference for recipes:
Hip Pressure Cooking
The New Fast Food (meals in 30 minutes or less)
The "fast food" one is vegan, but it's actually really good for making delicious veggie sides for your main meal. The Hip Pressure Cooking book has a regularly-updated website to go along with it.
Miss Vickie's website is also really good.
5. Makes applesauce & soups super easily. I would recommend investing in a good immersion (stick) blender (I have a Miallegro 9090, it's awesome). You can cook up apples & pears for applesauce, throw in some cinnamon, and blend it all right in a mason jar. For soups, you can do stuff like sweet potato chipotle & just use the immersion blender to mix the soup right in the Instant Pot bowl.
6. Homemade broth is great (veggie or chicken).
7. Basically anything you can make in a slow cooker, you can do in this - faster. Nearly everything takes under an hour, and some stuff only takes 5 or 10 minutes once it pressurizes.
8. Make sure to learn the difference between the quick release & the natural release. For a lot of meat dishes, you'll want to use the natural release (letting the pressure out slowly over time automatically) to make it more tender. Some veggie dishes like lentils benefit from this too.
It's kind of a hard device to wrap your head around...I'm 4 months into it & I still don't feel fully qualified on it because it's so versatile; I feel like I should be using it a lot more than I do, but it's kind of a learning process to adapt each recipe individually to faster cooking. Especially the Instant Pot models, because you can saute, slow-cook, do basic sous vide (at least on the newer Smart model), and other functions. A lot of people are into "one-pot" dishes, where you make the whole meal in the IP...saute the meat, then pressure-cook it with the veggies. Last night I did chicken in my cast iron pan, Indian lentils in the IP, and GF noodles in my
Fasta Pasta. Very little work involved for a very delicious meal! It's a wicked cool toy, definitely recommend them to anyone looking for a non-unitasking appliance for cooking faster at home.
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