I won, I won!!

A little while ago I entered Lakeland's £5,000 Summer Free Prize Draw on their website, as I'm a little bit of a competition fiend and it was a simple competition to enter as I only had to give them my email address. On Thursday I got an email from them saying I'd won a runner up prize of £150 gift vouchers! I was really chuffed as I'd been flicking through their catalogues and making a mental wishlist of things I really would like but couldn't really afford.

So over the weekend I've been making a proper wishlist and I have to say it's been quite difficult to choose what I'd like to spend my vouchers on as there are so many great things to buy! I already knew that I wanted to get a proper potato ricer, as I LOVE potatoes and I really like mashed potatoes. I'd read that you can microwave potatoes in their skins and then cut them in half and put them straight in the ricer and all the skin stays in the ricer. So I'd really like to be able to make quick and easy mashed potato, even if it's just for myself as Steve isn't a potato lover. I've read the reviews and looked at the ricers in a Lakeland shop and decided I'll get the most expensive one, the Chef'n Potato Ricer as it looks the best quality.

The ricer is nearly £32, but that still leaves me with £118 to spend. I did entertain the idea of getting the Morphy Richards Soup Maker for a while, but I decided it was an expensive uni-tasker (as Alton Brown says "Beware the uni-tasker") and a saucepan and stick blender does just as good a job. Then I thought about getting the Remoska Electric Cooker but I decided against it as it seemed like it did a very similar job to a halogen oven which is also on my mental wishlist, but you can get these for half the price.

So after a lot of thought and research, I've decided to get a pressure cooker! I'm going to push the boat out and get the more expensive one that Lakeland offer which is the Kuhn Rikon Pressure Cooker. I've never used one before as my parents used to have an old style one when I was growing up and all the frightening hissing really put me off. But everyone who has reviewed/written about modern pressure cookers says they're completely different now and I'm hoping the new style will be easy to use and I will be able to make our favourite meals in half the time. For instance I'm cooking a Lamb Massaman right now in my Tefal 4-in-1 slow cooker and it's going to take at least 6 hours for the meat to get tender. Apparently pressure cookers can create stews/casseroles in 20 minutes!

I'm really excited about learning a new style of cooking and hopefully I will be able to post some recipes that I've adapted for pressure cooking once I get the hang of it. Any advice gratefully received!

Everyone says I'm so lucky to win so many competitions (I don't win that many, the last one was for a stay at the Aviator Hotel in May last year  - I still need to write about this!) but I always say "you've got to be in it to win it!"