I am so glad that I splurged on an electric pressure cooker last month. I like that I can check out your website during the day at work and have time to cook something delicious after work! Well, technically, I get home 2 hours before my husband does.. but I don’t want to spend the whole time cooking!!

Hi Kerry – don’t be afraid. How about doing a trial run with just water, then you’ll know what to expect and know you’re doing it right – the noises it makes when it comes to pressure, that you’ve got the lid on just right, etc.

If you’re using frozen chicken breasts, add 3 minutes to the recipe time.

Thanks Jonthon – so glad you enjoyed them!

Hi Anna – thanks for sharing all your tips. I’ve been after my husband to buy a second freezer so I’ll have more room to stock up. Such great ideas.

However, I’ve been making DIY Taco Plate and Taco Salad for years (decades actually), using a base of crushed tortilla chips and/or sliced romaine lettuce and taco toppings and deboned shredded or chopped cooked whole chicken*. So I was way ahead of Chipotle Grill’s bowl option, lol. I guess the main difference between Walking Tacos and what I’ve been doing is the serving vessel.

I don’t think the non-GMO corn tortilla chips I buy are available in single serve bags, but I do think another crunchy snack my family enjoys fairly often might be available single serve or smallish bags – pork rinds, aka chicharrones. I always choose the unflavored pork rind variety because it’s simply made from pork & salt & nothing else (& while I wouldn’t rely on pork rinds as a main source of protein, pork rinds are mostly composed of protein and the pork fat, which is mostly rendered out, is mostly monounsaturated and a traditional fat used by humans for thousands of years, just like olive oil).

I’ve used crushed pork rinds as a low carb, gluten-free bread crumb substitute for the last 10 years or so, but it never occurred to me to just lightly crush them and use them as a crunchy low carb stand-in for crushed corn tortilla chips in Taco Plate. If I can find pork rinds in small single serve bags, I’ll definitely try them in Walking Tacos. If not, I suppose a disposable bowl would work just as well as a chip bag at a picnic.

BTW, for others like me who don’t buy canned beans anymore, cooked pinto or black beans freeze beautifully in recipe-sized or even single serve portions. Anytime I cook plain pinto or black beans, I try to make enough to set aside a small zip of vacuum sealed bag for the freezer. I also freeze presoaked uncooked beans for the times I want to make a bean recipe but didn’t plan ahead for pre-soaking. It’s important to label, though. Once a family member mistook soaked uncooked beans for cooked. Not good. 😉

* I cook a whole 4-5# organic pasture-raised chicken nearly every week in my Instant Pot pressure cooker, with 2 cups water or broth, for about 20-25 min, then pull off the meat & store it in the fridge for quick meals. I put the chicken scraps and any other chicken bones, necks, backs, & gizzards saved in the freezer with any carrots, onions, and or celery I have that need to be used up (or none if not available) with more water back in the pot for 1-2 hours of pressure cooking for a ready supply of chicken bone broth. The pressure cooker method is just as good and so much faster than my previous 2-3 hour slow poach plus 24 hour slow cook method – plus the house doesn’t smell like a broth factory with the sealed pressure cooker. This method is economical, too. Less electricity, less heating up of the kitchen, and even though organic chicken costs much more per pound than conventional, a whole organic chicken cooked this way is a bargain compared to buying boneless chicken breasts & cartons of broth, and there’s far less packaging trash. The weekly whole chicken routine done at my leisure also saves SO much time later if meals need to be made in a rush. Plus it offers my teenager something nourishing when he’s surveying the fridge for an EZ quick snack. Also, my husband and I prefer dark poultry meat over white meat, but our son prefers white meat, so a whole chicken makes everyone happy. I cook a weekly or every other week batch of .5 -1 # of dried pinto beans, too, for refried beans (tacos, nachos, tostadas, dip, etc.). Keeping these staples stocked in the fridge makes feeding a ravenous teenage boy SO much easier.