A little chicken and mega vegetable soup

Welcome to the Flatland kitchen where appliances get dusted off periodically and put to use. This evening we dust off the PRESSURE COOKER! Wait!... don't turn the channel to another blog just yet. This is the lazy person's guide to good soup, and I'm one of the laziest non cookers I know.
First get together your preferred cast of characters. My choice tonight consists of: leeks, onions, celery, carrot, mini saucer shaped zucchini, garlic, potatoes, broth, peppercorns, bay leaf, salt and chicken. Dust off the mandoline and go to town slicing away at the vegetables.


I didn't add any legumes that might make a foam on top of the liquid, but if you do add them be sure to avoid over filling the pot. I came right up to the 2/3 mark on the inside of my pot- that is liquid and vegetables combined*.
Then bring the pressure cooker to its high pressure setting ( on this pot it is the second red ring), and run to the other side of the kitchen to observe from a safe distance. Kidding! Although as you can see in this low quality pic the pressure is higher than the 2nd ring so I let out some steam by pushing down on the valve stem with a wooden spoon until it sat just at the second mark. There were no explosions this evening.
This is how things look at the end of the cooking time (12 minutes!) plus the natural release time (maybe 10-15 min) which means turn off flame, remove from hot burner and wait till pressure valve stem falls to the no pressure setting. I don't know the exact timing of this last part as I was surfing the web.
Ah! If only you had blogger smell-o-vision. Deeelishus!
*In the beginning I was unsure about the meaning of this mark, thinking it was liquids only.