I read an article on the BBC website last year about the Instant Pot’s inventor. It was a business article talking about how this uninspiring thing (an electric pressure cooker), invented by a bloke in Canada, had taken the world by storm and made the inventor millions! I was intrigued because I am a cookery gadget geek and I’d never heard of it. I googled it and saw article after article talking about how utterly amazing it is and how it’s changed people’s lives. My interest was definitely piqued.

Then I discovered it’s not available in shops in the UK but could be bought on Amazon – hmph, the devil’s lair…oh and Costco. Now that’s interesting. My parents have a Costco card so I hitched a ride on their coat-tails and at the end of a trip to said store, for the bargain price of £70, I found myself in possession of one.

I got it home, unpacked it and put it straight to use. Two or three mini-disasters later (it takes a bit of getting used to), I found my Instant Pot mojo. It has revolutionised my life and midweek cooking after a hard day at work has suddenly become easy-peasy. It’s great for the one pot meal but its uses are far, far wider. You can cook multiple dishes in it using the (get the special terminology) PIP or pot in pot method. It cooks rice to perfection – every time. Potentially its strangest benefit is that you can cook hard-boiled eggs in it in 2 minutes and the shells slip off with ease - no more fiddling about trying to extract egg from shell, you just crack it and the whole thing comes off in a single go. It makes the most stunning, delicious, creamy yogurt, so good that I’ll never buy another pot of yogurt again. The best bit is that it is great for proving bread dough, using the yogurt setting. In fact there is some enriched dough in mine now, waiting to be turned into raspberry breakfast rolls using home-grown then frozen raspberries.

The interesting bit is the devotion of Potheads. There are so many websites dedicated to IP recipes, fan pages where people go on and on about their undisputed fabulousness. People buy decals for them, give them names, own several of them and spend hours discussing the finer points of use. People lament leaving their pot on the hob then turning on the hob and melting its base or pouring liquid into it only to find the inner liner is still in the dishwasher or whatever other disaster. All-in-all, there is a frenzy around these beasts like nothing I’ve seen before…ever.

I love my pot, it's changed my life, but if you ever catch me calling it Basil, or Boris, or Zachariah or whatever, take me outside and shoot me please!