Instant Pot Fruited Wild Rice Salad with Sweet Potato

This vegan and grain free Instant Pot salad combines chewy wild rice and tender sweet potato with grapes and clementines in a lemony herb dressing. Perfect for summer alongside grilled meats or for fall alongside baked meatloaf.  

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I have meaningful work and it's an amazing thing to be able to write that statement.
What does this have to do with the Instant Pot Fruited Wild Rice and Sweet Potato Salad recipe I'm sharing today? 
The short version is that I discovered the dressing I'm using in this salad (I've got a DIY version, too, see the Note below) via my work with Minnesota Central Kitchen turning rescued/donated ingredients into meals for hungry people in the Twin Cities area.
If that's enough for you please feel free to scroll on down to the recipe.

Instant Pot Greek Wild Rice Salad

Colorful and flavorful with a wonderful assortment of textures, this Instant Pot Greek Wild Rice Salad is great for a holiday gathering or a simple supper. Use the Instant Pot to quickly and easily cook your wild rice for this filling grain free side dish or, if you want, add some additional protein and make it a complete meal.

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This Greek wild rice salad starts with pressure-cooked tender wild rice marinated in Greek salad dressing tossed with spinach, feta, and a rotating cast of preserved and fresh vegetables.

While developing this recipe I made this salad three or four times in slightly different ways, and each time my spouse said, "wow, this is a great salad". Before I decided to put it on the website I figured I should ask a wider audience, so I made it for one of my Instant Pot cooking classes.

It was a hit--from the students to the building monitor and custodian who helped me 'deal' with the leftovers!  Next I served it to my extended family members, twice, and I think it's about as good as it's going to get.

One of the reasons I like to use my electric pressure cooker is that, once programmed, I just walk away from the kitchen and go do my own thing. You can see my Top 5 Reasons I Love My Instant Pot here.

Instant Pot Chicken and Wild Rice Soup

An Instant Pot version of the classic creamy chicken & wild rice soup. Laden with mushrooms, carrots & celery, this soup cooks from frozen chicken breasts in under an hour in an electric pressure cooker.

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Yes, it's been a while. I've been teaching a series of Instant Pot Basics cooking classes for the past two months. We make this recipe in Class 2:  Cooking from Frozen. My students have inspired me to create some new recipes for the Instant Pot that I'll be sharing here now that I'm in between classes for a bit, so stay tuned!


I love using my IP for soup. The ability to sauté the veggies, deglaze the pan, and then add the rest of the ingredients and walk away is heavenly! Because I'm sharing soups with my folks and my girlie as well, I've had days this winter when I've made 3 different soups in a single morning. My days are not All Soup All The Time, though. Mostly I've been spending my time shoveling since Minnesota decided to welcome me in a Big Way. We live on a corner, so after the first 5 or 6 snowfalls we really got the hang of shoveling this place. I even shoveled a racetrack in the backyard since there's so much snow. (You can see video of the dogs running their track on my FB and IG feeds.)

Grilled Steak & Vegetable Wild Rice Salad

A hearty main dish salad of grilled steak, zucchini, mushrooms and peppers tossed with wild rice and topped with olives, artichoke hearts, and feta cheese.

If you've been on my FB page lately, you'll see evidence that my motto is Grill All The Things. I don't know if it's because I'm so stoked about having a decent grill or because I can't stand to see a hot cooking appliance (NOT in my kitchen) underutilized or what. I just know that I've been routinely grilling some vegetables, fruit, and perhaps a protein or a pizza each time I fire it up. I've learned how to get the propane tank refilled, and I'm really looking forward to playing once the summer bounty of the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share is arriving in my kitchen.

Grilling often means that I've got extra grilled stuff to use on the off days. Following that 'cook once, eat twice' philosophy, I've got a main dish spring salad to share with you today. This hearty salad is for the days when you've worked hard [weeding, pruning, mulching, planting, doing a marathon 5K instead of reading the Sunday paper--pick your reason for a hearty salad]. It's satisfying and can be customized to suit your tastes with optional toppings. I went with a Mediterranean theme because I'm sort of stuck on artichokes, olives and feta cheese these days.

A warm day followed by a cool evening is a great time for a filling salad such as this. We enjoyed it slightly warm, tossing all of the previously grilled items with hot rice. My daughter preferred the leftovers served at room temperature, with plenty of cheese.

For other recipes using mushrooms, please see my Mushroom Recipes Collection. For other recipes using Zucchini, please see my Zucchini Recipes Collection. These collections are part of the Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient. Want to know how to Use This Blog? Click here.

Farm Share Vegetable & Wild Rice Pilaf

Farm share vegetables--carrots, radishes, celery and onion--sautéed and combined with wild rice for a side dish that goes with a wide variety of dishes.

My 5 yr old daughter: Where is the soy sauce?

Me: There is no soy sauce. This isn't that kind of rice. It's Uncle Ben's.

My 7 yr old son: Who is Uncle Ben?

The first summer we spent in the midwest we ate at a country buffet restaurant. It was a new experience for all of us. My son earned a coupon from a summer reading program so we explored our new environment through food. My kids had never seen long grain rice and were mystified that you could eat rice with butter, not soy sauce.

[After being stationed in both Japan and Hawaii, and learning how to make my own sushi even before joining the military, I'd forgotten all about long grain rice. Our staple rice, cooked in the rice cooker because I'd burn it any other way, is yellow bag calrose or hinode rice.] 

This recipe is not some wow amazeballs novel innovative dish. It's just a simple way, when you're looking at a pile of vegetables from the community supported agriculture (CSA) farm share, to get those veggies out of your refrigerator and into your family. We ate it as a side dish with ham. I stirred chicken chunks and bok choy into a batch. My kids ate bowls as an after school snack [it is a Costco-sized container of rice after all].

Sweet & Sour Ham Balls & Upcycling Food

Ham and ground beef form the base of these meatballs, baked in a sweet and sour sauce. Great as an appetizer or over rice. Read on for how I upcycle one holiday ham into 2 new dishes.

As my brain kicks over into Holiday Mode [doubtless spurred by the failures--shown on my FB page--when I branch out in a new cookie direction despite having a baking deadline plus production quota for the Airmen's Cookie Drive] I'm uncovering a tendency to value traditional flavors over the latest food fad. [Not that I'm up on food fads--I'm utterly behind the times in food and fashion both.] During the holidays it seems, more than usual, I need to make each kitchen session count. That's where the second half of the post title, Upcycling Food, comes into play.

Making a beloved Thanksgiving Leftovers Casserole--layering mashed potatoes, stuffing/dressing, turkey and gravy into one yummy dish--is not upcycling. I'm not making something entirely different with the leftovers, I'm just repackaging the same goodness in a different container. While I love that casserole, it's not the concept I wish to expound upon.  I want to talk about upcycling--making something entirely new out of previously used materials.

When we moved in the back yard was partially fenced. We knew we'd be getting a dog [though we didn't know we'd get two more, then lose one, then get another--nor did we know that I'd start a blog and chronicle our pet population with pizza recipes] so we planned to have the partial fence removed and a new fence put in to completely enclose the yard. My clever spouse took a look at the still perfectly useful cedar fence and suggested he use it to make our raised beds.  As you can see through my little collage, it worked.  He upcycled the fence boards into raised beds which we filled with dirt, manure, leaves, and more manure. Then I grew food. It always comes back to the food with me.

This recipe is from my grandma (Mrs Harry Olsen of Fort Frances, Ontario) who was given it by Kathleen Smith (Mrs George C.B. Smith). When my mom wrote in the notes that it was given to my grandma 'years ago' we're talking a long time ago! This recipe has been made in our family since when, Mom?
These ham balls use a pound of cooked ham--if you serve ham at a holiday meal, you can serve ham balls as an appetizer at a holiday party, then serve Ham Ball & Black Eyed Pea Chirashi Rice for New Year's good luck.  That's 3 different meals out of one ham, that's upcycling, and that's almost all I've got to say about that.*