A pressure cooker has the potential for accidents, plus I always have to fight with the gasket. Go crock pot. Or marry a chef and eat out.

Never used a pressure cooker. During my 5 minute macrobiotic phase, it was highly recommended for cooking beans.

I don't know about the pressure cooker. The coyote always had major problems with it when trying to cook Bugs. Make sure you don't buy Acme.

I have a crock pot that I haven't used in ten years. Nothing wrong with it--just not all it was cracked up to be. I would love a pressure cooker though. That's the way to make real falling-off-the-bone roasts. And the new ones aren't the dangerous exploding gasket types.

I've never used a pressure cooker. We do have a love affair with our crockpot, though. I could never imagine a reason to have one, and now I can't figure how we could live without it. We make a lot of soup in the thing, since it's big enough to throw what's left of a chicken in. Homemade chicken soup. Yum.

It's starting to look like a Jets-and-Sharks sort of thing. From what I've read on the cooking discussion boards, passions run pretty high on this issue.

Crockpot! Set and forget. Pressure cooker brings possibility of level 5 kablooey right there in the kitchen. No thanks.

I like both pressure cookers AND crock pots, so I can't advise on this one. They are good for different things.

As for the housework thing... my ex called it a 'cleaning frenzy' when I went into that mode (play on the 'feeding frenzy' of sharks). Pretty accurate of him, I must admit...

It's astonishing how quickly those moods come upon one.

Of course, they go just as quickly.

I'm 40 y/o and I still shiver at the thought of a pressure cooker. When I was a kid, my mother and grandmother really put the fear of God in me during canning season. In retrospect, they went a bit overboard.

My mother used hers all the time. It was the old-fashioned rocking-steam-vent type, and electric. One of the three legs eventually gave way, so she had an old can of spices she'd use instead.