Pressure Cooker Vegetable Soup

The prematurely cold weather this weekend on the east coast got me thinking about chilly weather comfort food.  My mom always made the best veggie soup when I was growing up.  One of my favorite childhood memories is mom making a big pot of hot soup for dinner on a cold evening.  You have to have a piece of crusty bread with soup but when I was a kid I always ate vegetable soup with buttered saltine crackers.  I would dip the cracker into the soup and then the butter would drip all over my hand....messy but so good.

 My mom would cook her soup for hours on the stove, but being the modern woman, I use my electric Cook's Essentials pressure cooker from QVC.  Love shopping on QVC (but that's another post!).  This one is a 6 quart pressure cooker and it has changed my life!  The thing is wonderfully fast and I am learning to adapt my recipes so I don't have to spend hours slaving at the hot stove.  Soup is one of the easiest things to convert to pressure cooking and the best thing about it is that you don't have to keep opening the pot lid to stir.  Clean up is so much faster since there is no splatter all over your stove.

 This recipe can also be converted to crab soup by adding a few steamed crab claws, crab meat and Old Bay seasoning to taste.

Pressure Cooker Vegetable Soup 

1 medium onion diced
1 lg baking potato diced
16 oz. bag mixed vegetables
1/2 cup barley
3 cups shredded cabbage
1 1/4 lbs. beef stew meat cubed
28 oz. can whole tomatoes
3 oz. tomato paste
2 T beef base (or 2  boullion cubes)
2 whole celery stalks
4 cups water


Cook the onion and beef cubes on the brown setting until the onions are tender.  Add the remaining ingredients and water to the fill line (in my cooker this is 4 cups).  Close the lid and cook for 10 minutes and wait for cooker to release pressure naturally.  Discard the celery stalks before serving. 
Enjoy!

Prep Time:  10 mins.     Cook Time:  10 mins.    Difficulty:  Easy    Servings:  About 8 bowls