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.

Easy Chile Relleno Pizza

Chile Relleno Pizza is an easy 5 ingredient vegetarian pizza which echoes the flavors of a cheese-stuffed, batter-dipped, roasted chile pepper. I just skipped the frying aspect, and tossed it on a pizza crust instead.

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This pizza can be enjoyed year round because the basic ingredients--eggs, salsa, roasted peppers--are accessible year round. It's got enough heat to make it interesting, and it's a meatless pizza that appeals to vegetarians and omnivores alike. You don't need a lot of preparation--a quick trip to the grocery store should set you up just fine--and making pizza at home is often faster than take out.

How do I make pizza at home faster than delivery?

Good planning is one of my keys to success in the kitchen--which sounds lofty but simply means that I've got a roll of parchment paper next to the foil and wax paper in the drawer, a pizza stone that lives in my oven and another that lives on my grill, and I'm likely to save that last cup of taco meat or that bit of leftover cooked potatoes because I'm thinking "I could put this on a pizza".


At any given moment you could open the door to the fridge or freezer and find a wide variety of vegetables and meats that would make a decent pizza. It's in my daily plan on Friday mornings to make a batch of pizza dough--something I do while the dogs are eating their breakfast.


If it's just two of us I'll still make a pair of pizzas but I'll divide the dough into thirds and save one in the freezer for a busy Friday. If you're interested in exploring more about making pizza at home, here's my Pizza Primer post--a brain dump (with images!) of my pizza wisdom from the past 20 years of making pizza at home.

Apple Fig Chutney

Use your seasonal fruits in tasty ways! Made of apples and fresh figs with savory spices, apple fig chutney is a tangy condiment that is easy to cook on the stove and can be water bath processed for shelf stability.

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I like to combine produce that ripens at the same time. Tomatoes and basil, for one example. Corn and zucchini, for another. Apples and figs are an area I'm slowly exploring. Last year I shared my Fresh Fig and Apple Salad. Today I've updated an old post with new video, an easier to read recipe card, and the same terrific recipe.


This recipe is based off of Marisa McClellan's Apple Pear Chutney recipe in her book Food in Jars, shown below. I changed it up a bit since I had fresh figs on offer. How did I get the fresh figs, you ask? Read on for my earlier thoughts on foraging fruit!