Easy Mu Shu Pork in the Instant Pot

Easy Instant Pot Mu Shu Pork is a simple meal consisting of pork, cabbage, and eggs seasoned with plummy hoisin sauce and served with a Chinese pancake. Skip the restaurant and control your own ingredients by making this quick dish!

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Do you like Egg Roll in a Bowl? You'll like this variation!

When I learned about Egg Roll in a Bowl--the fast & easy method of using a couple of bags of coleslaw mix in place of chopping AllTheThings--I thought it would be perfect for my Instant Pot on Campus series. This series consists of recipes that use few ingredients with simple preparation, and I spent the summer teaching my son several recipes before sending him off with an Instant Pot electric pressure cooker to start his own Instant Pot on Campus adventures. You can find my other Instant Pot on Campus recipes here.



After I made the Egg Roll in a Bowl recipe I realized how, with a couple of tweaks, I could re-create my favorite Chinese restaurant dish--Mu Shu Pork. The Mu Shu Pork I get in Chinese restaurants has mushrooms in it, but not every eater in my household likes mushrooms. That's the beauty of cooking at home--you can customize your meals to your eaters' tastes.

Potluck Asian Chicken Cabbage Salad

Chicken, cabbage and salad greens tossed with an easy Asian dressing. Almonds, radishes, and ramen provide a crunchy contrast to this pot luck salad.

I had cabbage and radishes aplenty when informed of the impending opportunity to use up farm share veggies pot luck. Following my tip to stick with the familiar, from my post Five Tips to Feed Your Family From the Farm Share, I decided to make a chicken & cabbage salad with an Asian dressing. The guests did not include vegetarians or folks with nut allergies, so I felt comfortable making my usual recipe which comes from the Better Homes & Gardens New Cookbook (Amazon affiliate link).

I've tweaked this recipe in a few ways, shown below. First off, I added salad greens since I'm serving a crowd. Second, I added radishes since I had some, I thought they'd look pretty, and the extra crunch would go well. Third, I used seasoned rice vinegar (the kind I use for my sushi rice) and, since that is sweetened, I omit the sugar. I double the dressing since it's so good--and so easy to make. Method-wise, I change the recipe by tossing the chicken-cabbage mixture with the dressing and let it hang out for a few hours. Then I toss the whole lot together with a bit more dressing and it's ready to serve.

If I were planning to take this to work for a lunchtime pot luck, I'd cook the chicken, toast the ramen & almonds, make the dressing and chop all the vegetables the night before. In the morning I'd combine the chicken, cabbage & some of the dressing in one container, the salad greens, radishes, and green onions in another, and the ramen and almonds in a third container. At serving time I'd [carefully] toss everything together with more dressing in a large bowl or serving tray, top with ramen and almonds, and serve with extra dressing on the side.

For more recipes using cabbage, please see my Cabbage Recipes Collection. For more recipes using salad greens, please see my Salad Greens Recipes Collection. For more ideas using radishes, please see my Radish Recipes Collection. These collections are all part of the Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient.

Mu Shu -ish (Leftover) Chicken Burritos (Quick Take)

When I was a little kid, I used to hate Chinese food.  Luckily, my parents' desire to expose us to new foods was undeterred.  My mom would bring a chicken sandwich along in a baggie when we'd go out to a Chinese restaurant.

I wasn't so nice the first time we brought our kids to an Ethiopian restaurant.  I figured they could find something to eat, and they did:  they subsisted on injera and copious amounts of water from their constantly replenished water glasses.  I had no idea how much water they were drinking until we had multiple potty emergencies during the subway ride home.

Eventually I learned to like Chinese food, and my favorite dish was Mu Shu Pork.  I'm not sure if I liked assembling and rolling my dinner or the flavor of the hoisin sauce best, but it was my favorite thing to order.  Now my favorite dish is Ma Po tofu from the Great Wall Szechuan House near Logan Circle in Washington, DC, and when my brother returns from overseas I bet he will pack some in a cooler, hop on a plane, and we'll enjoy some together.

You wouldn't think from the title of this recipe that this is a 'kitchen sink' dish, but it is.  I had leftover roasted chicken, half a savoy cabbage, some mushrooms that were on their last stems, and we needed dinner.  This came together quickly, tasted great, and was a big flavor difference from the original chicken meal--my favorite way to cook once and eat twice.  This is not true a true Mu Shu--the mushrooms are all wrong and there's no egg for starters, hence the addition of -ish to the title.  Consider this if you've got a roast chicken and want to change it up a bit.

Fried Rice with Greens and Chicken [Cooking with Teens: Episode One]

Yes, two rice dishes in a row.  I've broken a food blogging rule, but you only become a teenager once.

After a call to action to help fight hunger in my last post, I'd like to share something hopeful:  kids are being taught to cook with Bok Choy in school.  Is that a stretch on the hopefulness scale?

I don't think so--I sure didn't learn about Bok Choy until I was an adult. When I hear about folks who desire to improve their health by including more vegetables on their plates, part of the stumbling block is just plain not knowing about different kinds of veggies.  And, if you get a CSA farm share box, chances are excellent that it will contain items you've never seen before much less know how to incorporate into your meals (sorrel, I'm talking 'bout you).  So yeah, kids being taught about Bok Choy is a hopeful sign to me.

I am now the mom of two teenagers, so in honor of that momentous occasion I made slave-drove encouraged assisted my newest teen while she fixed supper.  In school, she'd made Chicken and Bok Choy Fried Rice, and she was forced planned to duplicate that for the family.  We only had cabbage, however, so there's the first lesson in cooking:

Use what you've got.

My girlie couldn't remember the exact specifics of the recipe, so we turned to technology--specifically the How To Cook Everything iPad app by Mark Bittman.  If you're interested in encouraging kids to cook, I recommend this app--it's $10 and I don't see a dime of that--because it's very thorough, easy to use, with clear illustrations, and has that cool techno-thing going for it that all the kids like these days.  Writing that made me feel older than being the mom of two teenagers already makes me feel, so I'll just leave it as "easy to use".

One of my goals for this summer (hey, helps to have something to look forward to) is that both kids pick up at least a meal a week, and in addition to cookbooks from the library and food blogs, the Bittman apps (we also have How To Cook Everything Vegetarian) are part of my strategy.  Guess what else, kids?  Lawn care!  You're beyond old enough and have had 2 summers w/ Dad doing the work for you.  Time to step up.

If you have Bok Choy, Chinese Cabbage, Savoy Cabbage, Napa Cabbage, Plain Old Ordinary Green Cabbage*, or what my farm shares term "Asian Greens", try this recipe.  Save the kale, mustard, collard, beet or turnip greens for other uses (see my visual Recipe Index by Ingredient for ideas).

*I have a fear of radicchio after attempting to make grilled radicchio, so you'll not see it on this blog.