A week and a half ago I went out and bought a slow cooker. (It was a Versaware by Crock-Pot for $39.99 at Kitchen Stuff Plus, to be exact.) I wondered at first whether this review would be a good fit for my blog since I don’t usually write on cooking. Is a slow cooker a parenting tool? But then I realized that an inordinate amount of my time and energy is spent thinking about, prepping for, and actually feeding my children. Anything that can help with that is definitely on topic.
I’m not entirely sure how I finally decided that I needed a slow cooker, but I suddenly could wait no longer. Dinner is at a crappy time of day is the essential problem. By the time 5pm or so rolls around the last thing anyone wants to do is try to figure out what on earth they can feed themselves. Let alone feed a family. Let alone try to prepare a meal with whiny, squealing, clingy, tired and hungry children underfoot. So my solution at least part of the time? (More times than I’d care to admit.) Forget about cooking and order in or go out.
There are obvious problems with this solution, the most obvious of which is money. I have easily spent 80% of my own discretionary spending on feeding my family for the past month. (The expense of feeding should be coming from the grocery budget, no?) Other problems are nutrition (which is related to money insofar as cost tends to be directly proportional to healthfulness), time and energy because it is really no faster in the end, and enjoyment. We do enjoy eating out as a family, but when it is a harried cop-out of a meal it winds up being a race to order and feed the kids and get out of there before total meltdowns occur.
I had already enjoyed some success (in terms of cooking ease and tasty results) with stews that were prepped way ahead of time and then simmered away on the stove top until dinner. But I then had to plan on being housebound while dinner cooked. It is nice to be able to get out of the house in the afternoon and let the kids work up an appetite at the park or just go for a walk or have a visit, especially since I tend to front-load my work day.
So eventually, somehow, I came to believe that a slow cooker would be my saviour. We didn’t have one growing up and I’d never actually cooked with one before, but I became convinced that all my heart-warming, winterlicious, slow cooked fantasies could come true if only . . . So, yeah, $40 bucks later I’m setting up my new Crock-Pot and planning tomorrow’s meal.
The next day I was running the dishwasher and the dryer and had pot roast and potatoes cooking in the Crock-Pot when I left the apartment to take Colum to swimming lessons and didn’t return home for two hours. When I did, I quickly steamed up some veggies and enjoyed an incredibly delicious meal — unbelievable! I’ve also cooked pork tenderloins in some honey-mustard sauce the recipe for which I got online and the results were somewhat less stellar. (Remember to put potatoes and veg under the meat in your slow cooker.) And then, last night, beef bourguinon that was unbelievably awesome.
It’s not really that it saves you time per se because there is still the prep (browning meat first is recommended, too) when you’re putting the meal together and then you will often want to whip up a salad or some quick cooking veggies at dinner-time. The value of a slow cooker is that you can choose the most convenient time of day to make dinner. That means that regardless of shifting nap times and rotating extracurriculars and impromptu meetings, you can still put together a nutritious home cooked meal. And cheap, too! All the tough and crappy cuts of meat are made for simmering all day — forget summer barbecuing, slow cooking is the bomb.
My particular Crock-Pot has a insert that can go from the stove (on something called a heat disperser) for browning meat and sauteing veggies (although not on higher than medium heat so I wonder if it might be just as easy to use a pan) and then into the slow cooker, straight into the fridge if need be, and then right into the oven to reheat. That’s pretty cool. It also looks good on the table. I don’t have any basis for comparison, but I think it’s a pretty fine product for the price. It has a 5-quart capacity which is alright. There are bigger ones, but this does our family — for now.
The only problem I have with it so far is that there’s no “on” light. I’ll turn it up to high and then just have to believe that it’s working before leaving home because it takes so long to heat up. Also, if there were a blown fuse or something, I would have no indication that my meal was no longer cooking. But I can deal with that as long as it keeps delivering deep-cooked flavours and tender morsels of meat.