I love my instant pot, it makes cooking meats and dried beans so easy.
Here I grabbed a hunk of frozen pork shoulder, threw it in the pot with a can of beer and some seasonings. Hour and a half later, pulled out the pork and dumped in some dry pinto beans to cook in the remaining liquid. Half hour after that, all that was left was to shred the pork and add it back to the beans with a jar of salsa verde I canned using produce I grew last year.
Stopping there would still have made for a good stew, but I reserved the pork fat cap prior to shredding, and roasted it, making crispy chef nibbles and a bunch of rendered fat. I coated slices of poblanos with the fat and charred them with my broiler and a blow torch.
The stew is topped with cotija cheese and the crumbs from the bottom of a bag of tortilla chips.
Why thank you! There's a few "genres" of cooking and baking that I know well enough to freestyle, and a lot of it is just tasting and knowing how to balance if you've gone too far in one aspect or another.
Like for example, I wouldn't normally make this with corn in it, but I'd tossed a bunch of jalapenos in with the pork that had turned extra spicy with heat stress from a recent heatwave in my area. So in tasting the stew, I decided it was overly spicy, and dumping in a half cup of corn took the spice down a notch.