Key kitchen conveniences – a quality Slow Cooker

As I've mentioned before, I happen to really enjoy cooking, but sometimes struggle with fitting the "process" of cooking in with a hectic daily (and evening) schedule.

Here is another suggestion for an essential kitchen item you should add to your arsenal to make cooking at home even easier and far more convenient:

A good slow cooker –
These magic little appliances originated 37 years ago, almost by accident. Their original intent was pretty specific - cooking beans. But folks quickly begin to experiment with the electric bean cooker, and today we have a great kitchen tool.

I use the original Crock-Pot® brand slow-cooker from Rival (pictured below), but the technology is pretty simple so don't get too hung up on brand names. The picture actually links to my amazon.com affiliate program, if you were inclined to purchase this exact model, but I encourage you to shop around. I actually bought mine at Costco a couple of years ago.

To help you get started, there are literally thousands of books on slow cooking so I’m not going to recreate a list for you here. I bought this book shortly after I got my slow cooker and have had some great successes from it:

As you can see, Amazon has it listed for around $12.00 bucks...not too bad and I go to this little book for more than just the slow cooking recipes.

William Sonomoa put it together and I love how it's laid out. Basically it's divided in to 3 main sections. The recipes are designated by "preparation" time and each page has a big color close up picture of what your finished result is "supposed" to look like (supposed is in quotes because you know as well as I they never quite look like that;-)

The first section of the book has 10 recipes that you can prep in 15 minutes.

The second section has 16 recipes that you can prep in 30 minutes.

The last section of 14 recipes is a list that will give you food plus extra for storage.

I love the appendix almost as much as I love the recipes. It has great tips on getting started, stocking the kitchen, saving time, and so on.

So in summary a slow cooker is a great time saver once you get the hang of it and when done right, it makes most any meat dish, stew, sauce, ratatouille, bolognese, gumbo, etc. turn out awesome.

Happy Cooking!