Adventures with a Crock Pot

My friend Mary keeps telling me that she can’t believe that I claim to not be able to cook and yet do not own a crock pot. She says a crock pot is the ultimate non-chef’s tool. (Plus, apparently you can’t have a testimony or probably even have pioneer heritage without one. I’m pretty sure I heard that in church or enrichment once!) So I am now borrowing a crock pot from another friend, Jacqui. Jacqui likes crock pots so much she has four of them in all different sizes, so she was willing to lend me one for a week, along with Fix-It and Forget-It Cookbook, so now I, too, can experience the joy.

Okay, sarcasm aside, I’m actually really excited. I planned out three meals for this week that all use it, and even managed to choose ones that were fairly different recipes. So, for example, hopefully I won’t end up making chicken with potatoes and carrots one day, only to turn around and make beef with potatoes and carrots the next day. That would be pretty boring. So yes, I’m living on the edge and trying all these crazy new things this week. This is busting outside of my normal, very boring cooking in a way that if you ate with us every night would be impressive. I usually only try out a new recipe only after I’ve gotten completely sick of the—- what? thirty?-— recipes that I make over and over again. (It’s a lucky thing that Craig is very NOT critical of my cooking!) So this time I’m trying out all sorts of new stuff all in just a week! The downside, of course, is that Craig is nervous that I’ll suddenly want to buy a crockpot if this goes well. I think there are worse things that I could covet, though.


Meal One

(I’ll just do this all as one post so it will be cohesive. I doubt anyone bothers to read blogs in the actual order that they’ve been posted, and it would make no sense at all if you read this all backwards.)

So today I made minestrone soup with the crock pot! It was a mess. For being the easiest thing in the world, I sure managed to screw it up. A lot! If I had to guess (and apparently I do!), I’d say my problem was that the meal I was making was too big for this poor little crock pot. That’s probably something I should have taken into consideration since all the ingredients barely even fit into the pot at all. But I’m new to all this. All I know is that I put everything in it like it said to do, I let it cook on “Low” for 7 hours, then added a few more ingredients and cooked it on “High” for another half-hour. No sweat, right? But the fact that after seven hours had passed the meat was still comPLETely pink did alarm me. But not enough for me to do anything different than what the recipe said to do. I just hoped that maybe switching it to “High” would make all the difference with the meat. But I can’t say that I was very surprised when it was still woefully undercooked after that last half-hour was over. I let it simmer for another half hour, and then finally gave up and scooped out enough for dinner into a pot and boiled it on the stove until the meat looked edible to me. (My mother, the Queen of Extremely Well Done Meat, would probably still have had a problem with it.) By this time the noodles had boiled down to little blobs rather than being the cute little shells they started out as, so it wasn’t the prettiest soup you’ve ever seen.

But. It tasted wonderful. It was definitely better than the Olive Garden’s minestrone soup, and possibly as good as the minestrone they give you at Thatsa Some Italian Ristorante. So as far as I’m concerned it was definitely worth all the stress. But I can’t say that I’m sold on crock pots just yet…

As a corollary to the day’s events, I left the rest of the soup cooking away on high while we ate and continued painting the living room (the only thing Craig is allowed to do these days). As of five minutes ago, that meat is STILL pink. And we’re about to go to bed. What in the world do I do with it now???

Meal Two

This time I did a roast with the obligatory carrots and potatoes and onion soup mix. It was pretty funny reading through the cookbook and realizing that about half the recipes for cooking a roast involved onion soup mix! Fortunately I had one on hand which I think was left here by my mother-in-law (Thanks, Donna!) And not to toot my own horn, but I was sort of proud of myself because it occurred to me before I even started cooking it that using a frozen roast was probably NOT going to work. So I thawed it out in the microwave first. (Is it just me or is a microwave sort of the antithesis of a crock pot?) We haven't actually eaten it yet, but it smells good and when we cut into it, it looked very well done. Happy days!

I guess you'll just have to wait until the next time I do internet to find out how meal #3 goes. I think that one was a chicken and gravy thing. Or maybe it was pork chops? Now I can't remember. I have both on hand. Maybe I've got two meals still left to do with the crockpot...? Dang, this takes a lot of planning ahead, doesn't it?

Anyway, happy eating tonight, I hope!