If you are super intimidated to start cooking in an Instapot, it's fine to get meal kits like this.

Literally dump it all in with a slow-cooker spices packet and 6 hours later you have days of food. Then start adding more of stuff you like such as extra onions or potatoes.

Tyson Ready for Slow Cooker Boneless Beef Roast with Vegetables Meal Kit, 3.9 lb https://www.walmart.com/ip/21553448

And you don't need every ingredient or a recipe for lots of slow cooker things. Today I'm just putting left over stuff. Onion soup mix, brown gravy mix, pre-cut chuck roast beef pieces (which I optionally browned in a pan first), an onion, mushrooms, and a bunch of garlic cloves.

It's really hard to fuck it up. I've decided I used too many mushrooms but guess what I just won't eat all of them. It's a soup you have a fork.

When you make your own food at home you realize how little meat and other premium ingredients you get in prepared food. Like $10 of chuck roast at Walmart could be the same amount of meat as $150 of DoorDash.

I know this is basic but no harm in being approachable. Been doing this for years now I wasted so much money on restaurant food.

Instapots are (optionally) pressure cookers but reason so popular is series of clever engineering that physically interlock where you can't fuck up if you literally try. If computer AND heater limit switch fails, overpressure valve for the outer vessel. You can find occasional rare stories about them failing but if it was a real problem they'd quickly be a social media pariah.

Just be mindful of not crazy overfilling where during (unnecessary) manual pressure release you allow the liquid to bubble up and sputter out the top. Even then it's designed to be easy to knock back closed. It's not been a problem for me.

Really it's a bunch of cool engineering. The old stove pressure cookers were frankly nightmare fuel.

@SwiftOnSecurity This is part of the reason why I consider my grad-level human factors in engineering one of the most valuable courses I've ever taken. Not for the technical background necessarily---that can come with experience---but for a broader understanding of how to design systems to fail safely, recover safely, to be cognizant and tolerant of human error, to learn from the mistakes and failures and policies already written in blood.

Knowing how to apply these concepts to your given domain of technical expertise BEFORE you find out the hard way is crucial when the live(lihood)s of others are at stake.

Not just defence in depth, but failsafes in depth too.