by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
The crock pot or slow cooker allows your meal to cook for hours, full days even, combining traits of patience and convenience in the kitchen. You can start it on the evening before the day you want it and can thus come home, after a hard day's work, to a meal ready to serve. I guess it was invented for the farmers and farm laborers and is, more or less, an upgrade of the haybox cooking method.
In theory, as with many ways of cooking you get out what you put in, but the simmering flavors can season an entire home with a great aroma of cooking and, I tell you, it will keep you mouth watering from early morning to serving time.
The slow cooking of the food also infuses the entire meal with the different flavors and food will never taste the same again. Having said that I would like to add one word of let me call is caution here and that is that some things may not exactly taste the way it does in other cooking and that because of all the flavors infusing the meat and vice versa.
Slow cookers, even the older ones, and I can vouch for that because I have both a very old one and a very modern so-called energy efficient one, are very energy efficient and use only as much energy as a low-wattage light bulb. Despite of a rating of say 500W that is not, in my experience, the power that it consumes.
Almost anything that can be cooked can be cooked in a crock pot, so recipes for the method are countless and the Internet is full of them. However, below are a couple that are simple, with ingredients that can mostly all be found at a local farmers’ market:
Slow Cooker Spiced Applesauce
Ingredients:
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8 apples—peeled, cored, and thinly sliced
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½ cup water
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1 teaspoon of spice blend with cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, clove, allspice
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¾ cup brown sugar
I also add some sultanas into this mix to add to the fruitiness.
Many people say to combine sliced apples with water in a slow cooker. However, I don't use any water for this recipe at all because the apples will have enough juice themselves. Cook on low for about 7 hours, or until saucy consistency.
Again, some recipes state to add the sugar and spices after the main 7 hours or more cooking I do add everything form the very beginning.
Cool before serving.
Market Vegetable Soup
Ingredients:
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2 cups water or vegetable stock
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4 cups of fresh vegetables (anything you can get locally and seasonally: corn, carrots, peas, beans, mushrooms, broccoli, etc.)
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3 cups of chopped tomatoes
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1 bay leaf
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¼ cup uncooked rice or pasta shells
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Salt and pepper to taste
Combine all ingredients in slow cooker, excluding rice or pasta. Cook on low for about 6 hours. Add rice or pasta half an hour before serving.
Hot Pot (English sausages, or Polish kielbasa, or other meat)
My greatest favorite is Hot Pot (which also might be simply called a stew)... and you can make many varieties of this one adding vegetables that are in season, etc.
Ingredients:
This is a recipe for one person (maybe two) using a fairly small crock pot...
Two bangers (ordinary or speciality) or this or that Polish kielbasa (the latter in slices, the former whole) or some stewing steak
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One onion medium sliced
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One or two potatoes (depending on size) sliced or in large chunks
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An apple cut into wedges
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Two tomatoes cut into wedges
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Other vegetables as desired, such as carrots, leek, turnip, swede, etc.
Put some butter into the bottom of the pot (or beef dripping) and add the inions and then the rest of the vegetables.
Add a beef stock cube or two, dissolved in a cup of boiling water, and put on lid. Leave top cook on high for a couple of hours and then set it to low. Will be done in about 6 hours can be left cooking though over night till next day supper time.
Enjoy.
Cooking in a crock pot is a healthy and environmentally-friendly way to cook as consumers very little energy indeed even though you may have it on for a long time.
© 2011
