I've been cooking a lot more lately, thanks to the greatest invention ever--a slow cooker with a timer on it. When the timer goes off, the slow cooker switches to warm, so the food is still hot but not overcooked when we get home.
I want to yell, "Slow cooker, where have you been all my life??" until I remember we actually had one growing up. My mom used it all the time, not that my dad was an appreciative audience. When we'd ask what was for dinner, he'd make a face and say, "Whatever crawled out of the Crock Pot." So thanks to that lasting image, I never fully embraced my slow cooker until now.
Turns out you can make more than just spaghetti sauce and stew in it! Mark digs it because he's eating more than just pasta or dried-out chicken these days. He's actually getting some protein, and he loves it.
Loves it so much, in fact, he inhales it. I can tell a meal is a success when he eats it straight out of the slow cooker, and I have to slap his little hands away. Last week I made ginger-plum pork roast, and he was eating it off his plate on the way to the table--then he tucked into it before I sat down.
I also made a pot roast that he liked. Liked it so much, in fact, that he gobbled it up as fast as he could--I was just starting in on my own dinner, when I noticed I didn't have any silverware.
The mystery was solved a minute later when I saw this:
I want to yell, "Slow cooker, where have you been all my life??" until I remember we actually had one growing up. My mom used it all the time, not that my dad was an appreciative audience. When we'd ask what was for dinner, he'd make a face and say, "Whatever crawled out of the Crock Pot." So thanks to that lasting image, I never fully embraced my slow cooker until now.
Turns out you can make more than just spaghetti sauce and stew in it! Mark digs it because he's eating more than just pasta or dried-out chicken these days. He's actually getting some protein, and he loves it.
Loves it so much, in fact, he inhales it. I can tell a meal is a success when he eats it straight out of the slow cooker, and I have to slap his little hands away. Last week I made ginger-plum pork roast, and he was eating it off his plate on the way to the table--then he tucked into it before I sat down.
I also made a pot roast that he liked. Liked it so much, in fact, that he gobbled it up as fast as he could--I was just starting in on my own dinner, when I noticed I didn't have any silverware.
The mystery was solved a minute later when I saw this:
That's right, one set of silverware wasn't enough for Mark--he took mine, too. I guess it helped him cut the meat and feed himself twice as fast.
But while the slow cooker has been a bit hit, I'm still struggling with that big white thing in the kitchen--the stove. This meal was supposed to be accompanied by brown rice (that's right, I'm making entrees AND side dishes now!).
However, brown rice takes almost an hour to make, and I ran out of time this morning. I cooked it about three-quarters of the way through, and then nuked it in the microwave for five minutes when I got home to finish it up.
If you're thinking to yourself, "Huh, I didn't know you could do that"--well, stop right there. Turns out you can't. This was the result:
Those two lumps of charcoal are burnt rice. I thought my microwave might catch fire at this point, and the smell of burnt rice permeated the house for days.
Sigh...one step forward, two steps back. Oh well, I'll just go back to the original idea of a one-pot meal--all side dishes will now cook in tandem inside the slow cooker, with the meat.
Sigh...one step forward, two steps back. Oh well, I'll just go back to the original idea of a one-pot meal--all side dishes will now cook in tandem inside the slow cooker, with the meat.
2 comments:
two words: rice cooker.
Ok, this question will prove my ignorance, RuthAnn, but can you cook brown rice in a rice cooker too? Do you just have to cook it longer, like you do on the stove?
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