Slow Cooker Revolutionby America's Test Kitchen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Slow Cooker Revolution / 978-1933615691
We've made several recipes out of this book and both my husband and I really like it.
The layout is very nice -- bolded recipe list on the side of each recipe, with the instructions across from the list. A lot of the recipes have little "tips" at the bottom of the page, often for how to select product or keep things from going bad. There are pictures, but there's not one for every recipe, but since this is a crock-pot book and not dishes that require a lot of assembly, I don't mind so much as I normally would.
I do wish that in addition to the cooking time, there was a "prep" time -- the last two recipes we tried (Baked Potato Soup, and a pork chops with soy sauce) had a lot of "fry the bacon in a pan, fry the chopped onions, stir in flour, stir in chicken broth slowly, THEN dump everything in cooker" and that takes a bit of time in the mornings when you're trying to get off to work. But it's a minor complaint and can be figured up pretty easily with a little more reading prior to trying the recipe.
Taste-wise, everything we've made so far with this book one or both of us has liked, so if you happen to share similar taste-buds with two random internet strangers, you'll like these recipes! For my friends in the food intolerances camp, this book doesn't try to be food intolerance friendly and there are no obvious recipe alterations offered for that. (Not surprising, since that's not how it's being marketed, but now you know.)
If you've got a slow cooker and you'd prefer a book of recipes to the hit-or-miss internet, I can recommend this one as having some solid offers.
NOTE: This review is based on a free Advance Review Copy of this book provided through Amazon Vine.
~ Ana Mardoll
14 comments:
Do you like your slow cooker? They're inextricably bound up in my mind with the speckled brown and harvest gold model my grandmother used for 30 years to make gelatinous heaps of baked beans, but maybe they're awesome? They seem to be making a resurgence, and I always want all the kitchen equipment, so . . .
I do like ours, a lot. At least once a week we throw in a chuck pot roast or a pork tenderloin, toss in some potatoes, cover with beef broth, and let it go all day. The result is usually delicious.
And last week we did the Baked Potato Soup in this book: basically, potatoes covered in chicken broth, stew all day until super soft, pull out and mash two cups of potatoes and then add back in to thicken, toss in sour cream and cheese and stir in, cover with chopped bacon.
NOM NOM NOM.
They have nice little bag liners now that make clean-up a lot simpler, assuming you remember to use them. (We frequently forget.)
Oooooh! I love cooking in my crockpot. Also I accidentally won a silent auction for a fancy-pants one with a timer, so I need to make some use of it.
Bag-liners! Fantastic!!!
I use it more in the winter. In the summer, anytime I can get away with grilling dinner, that's what I do.
Yeah, really good call in the prep time. That's essential.
Not Ana, but I love mine! Toss in some stew beef or some other meat and chopped vegetables and some broth, go to work, and I come home to hot delicious soup/stew/whatever.
That was a general "you"! (I should have said y'all, a phrase which is infinitely useful.)
The baked potato soup sounds awesome.
As a general word of crock-pot advice (not for our beloved blogger here, but anyone else thinking "hey, slow cooking sounds like a good idea!"), use the cheapest cuts of meat you possibly can. Any good recipe book will probably stress this, but it bears repeating.
Crock-pots are great at long, low(-ish) temperature, wet cooking. This is a horrible way to treat a nice piece of meat like a steak (which likes to be seared on the outside and cooked just barely enough for the fat to start melting), but this is an excellent way of dealing with less-desirable inner cuts. Collagen and connective tissue just binds up into gristle (yum!) with hot/fast cooking , but it dissolves into tasty gelatin when left in the slow cooker all day.
Another vote for slow cookers here. I really love stews and soups, and slow cookers are an easy way to produce them, even on work days. Also good for any tomato sauce recipe that involves simmering endlessly, that kind of thing.
Well, I know what my brother's next Christmas present is going to be.
My stepdad owns this book, and we eat out of it a lot. One of my favorite dishes, chicken enchilada casserole, comes from here! So while I can't actually cook and therefore can't speak to that aspect of it, I definitely can testify to the general tastiness of the recipes. :)
Are they really intended/safe to be left unattended all day? That's my big issue with getting one, since I live alone and work.
Intended to be safe - I think so. Many recipes take 6-10 hours to cook - I always assumed they're meant for meals you put on before you leave for work so you can have hot food ready when you get home. (One of my much-loved childhood books deals with the power tripping so the crockpot failed to cook dinner, so everyone came home from work/school and was hungry and grumpy.) As to whether they actually are safe, all I can say is that my house is currently intact, and I leave mine on.
Good to know. :) Perhaps when I've got an apartment with a real kitchen...
Crock pots are intended to be safe.
However, you should always check the cord where it exits the pot before you plug it in and leave it all day. My primary crockpot developed a crack in the insulation of the cord right at the exit point that (fortunately) caused me to have to throw away a nice 3 lb pork roast and popped my circuit breaker. I say fortunately, because that is much preferable to the alternate outcome of that, which would have been a kitchen/house fire.
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Re: the non-allergen friendliness of the cookbook
Does it include simple ingredients that are allergens or does it have lots of recipes that include 'dump in a can of prepared food x'? Simple ingredients that need substituting are relatively easy to work around--dump in a can recipes, I find, aren't...
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