I can proudly claim that I have been keeping up with at
least one of my new year’s resolutions. I vowed to use my slow cooker more this
year, and I have much to the delight of Hospo baby. The slow cooker was another
one of those appliances that sound like you must have them, so you buy them and
then you use it maybe twice a year. The incentive to use the slow cooker more, came
from Zoya. As she is almost two, she now loves to help me in the kitchen once
she comes home from daycare. Sometimes it is great to have her stand on her
little chair to reach up to the bench top and help me count garlic cloves or
put pasta into the pot. However when I am exhausted after a long day and she insists
on emptying the pantry, it can be a pain. I prefer to have something delicious
simmering away, ready just in time for our dinner. The time we can spend out of
the kitchen is another bonus.
I truly struggled with finding good slow cooker recipes, I
looked at several cookbooks and they all seemed to be creating stodge! I
finally came across Martha Stewart’s website and all her slow cooking recipes.
So far we have made Buffalo chicken burgers for all the staff at the
restaurant, pulled pork sliders with pickled cabbage and chicken tacos.
Hospo baby often struggles with big chunks of
meat, when meat is slow cooked and it shreds she loves it. She had two bowls of
pork meat meant for the sliders and has asked to have tacos for dinner several
times since then. Last week I tried making something I would have thought
fundamentally wrong. I made lasagna in the slow cooker. I did not bake my
lasagna, no; I layered it in the pot and forgot about it for 8 hours. When I
got home, the beautiful aroma of meaty sauce filled the house but I was scared
to lift the lid and look at the results. Surprisingly the pasta was better
cooked than the ones I make in the oven.
I can’t slow cook all my meals, but a meal a week is all the
respite I need. Now only if my resolution to use the treadmill more would be as
easy as this.
For all the recipes mentioned above go to:
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