Just Like Mom's
Slow cookers. Redolent of chili, barbecued Smoky links, macrame, mushroom decor, Avocado appliances, and a society-wide, decade long epidemic of bad hair. The ghost of a thousand church pitch-ins. One of the few gotta-have-it appliances from my childhood that’s still around (unlike the hot dog cooker that basically electrocuted hot dogs–I have one, if anyone doubts me).
For years, I associated slow cookers with that whole regrettable era of the 70′s; the years when “exotic food” meant “Chung King from two cans” (unless you were lucky enough to live in Manhattan or L.A.) and no one north of Texas knew what tacos were. The only time my mom ever brought ours out was to make either chili or beef soup for some kind of pitch-in. She didn’t even use it for pot roasts, because those were usually for Sunday dinner, and a slow cooker took too long and was too small! And that’s the way I used the one I kept from the three I got for my wedding. Until I got rid of it because it was only really a sauce-sized pot.
Two years ago, my life changed drastically when my daughter started with a pre-professional ballet school. Suddenly I had almost no time to cook, because we were gone several evenings a week right over the dinner hour. I had been subscribing to a menu service for a couple of years that told me what to cook, and the food was flat-out great, but it required time in the kitchen I just didn’t have. And I realized I was going to have to deal with my leptin insensitivity/insulin insensitivity problems before I ended up with full-blown diabetes.
I thought about my options, and asked a couple of the other ballet moms. The answer: a slow cooker.
It is amazing what you can do with a slow cooker. I’ve done quiche; mashed “fauxtatoes”; spiced nuts; custard; roasts…I would say I’ve only used it for soup or dips less than 5% of the time!
When I bought mine, I wanted to get one big enough to actually be useful. In the interim I’d been given the “average” 5 qt. size crockpot; but with a family of 5 that includes a teen boy I knew it was going to be too small. So that put me into the oval slow cookers.
I also needed to deal with the problem of not necessarily being home when it was done, because they give the kids their full allotted time, no matter what the clock says, so that sometimes class goes over. And I wanted to be able to take it places easily. In the past, taking a crockpot of chili somewhere required a newspaper and plastic bag-lined box in case it spilled during transit.
Slow cookers have come a LONG way since 1974! The one I found was a programmable Hamilton Beach with a clamp-on lid and thermometer, 7 quarts. It has a stainless steel exterior and removable stoneware interior. I can set it on low or high for increments of 1/2 hour up to 12 hours; it will turn itself to “warm” when it’s done and stay on that setting for another 12 hours, or until I turn it off. Or I can use the thermometer and set it for a certain temp, and it will turn itself to warm once that’s temperature is reached.
There are other programmable slow cookers that cost as much as 8 times what I paid that will allow different timing increments, but they really don’t do 8 times what this one does.
And there are also slow cookers that offer a variety of insert sizes with one base, but they aren’t very transportable–they’re even sort of funnel-shaped and not terribly stable when the largest inserts are used. Fine on a counter, but not on a table for a pitch-in (at least the ones I saw when I was looking).
Now I use my slow cooker starting when it begins to get cool sometime in September or October, up to when it’s grilling weather. I sometimes use it in the summer when the weather’s nice by putting it on my deck table so it doesn’t heat up the kitchen, but not often. It gets a vacation then. And it deserves it, because it is rarely empty September through about May or June!
Whatever slow cooker you have, here are a few tips to make using it easier:
Sear meat before putting it in the slow cooker. The Maillard Reaction of browning, where the sugars and proteins in the meat combine, adds a lot of flavor; browning meat also adds texture.
After you sear the meat, deglaze the pan using some of the liquids from the recipe. If you use a very hot pan and don’t let it cool at all before pouring the liquid in, the stuck-on browned bits, called “fond”, will come right up. This is the most flavorful part of what you’ve browned, so get it all! Add a few extra ounces of the liquid to account for the evaporation from the deglazing.
If you can eat starch, you can bread the meat before browning it, and the starch will help it form a sauce as it cooks. Otherwise, you can thicken with xanthan or guar gum, or Xpert Food’s Thick n’ Thin Not/Starch after removing the solids from the slow cooker at the end of cooking.
Whatever you put in the slow cooker is going to be juicier than you think, because the liquids won’t evaporate they would on the stovetop or in the oven. I sometimes use frozen cauliflower to make fauxtatoes, and I don’t add any water at all so that I don’t need to drain them at the end of cooking time (about 2 hours), the way I would on the stove.
You can do custards and quiches by using a ceramic casserole dish that will fit inside your slow cooker (another reason to get a BIG one). Put the ingredients inside the casserole dish and the pour very hot water inside the slow cooker to within about an inch of the top of the dish. Cover and cook on low. This works wonderfully on egg-based dishes that would normally take just a little too much time to do if you had to have the oven on that whole time. Oh, and cheesecakes!
You can even do meatloaf if you put it on a rack! I’ve even done Carnitas in it. And things like stuffed bell peppers and flounder rolls and stuffed seafood things!
You can make nicely-spiced nuts and nut mixes in your slow cooker! Soak them as usual; melt butter, mix in the spices, and then mix with the nuts in the cooker. A few hours on low does the trick.
And sometimes I do chili and dips. Yes, I do. And channel Mrs. Brady while I do it.