Fun With Crock Pots

One of my perpetual goals is to cook more - and by that I mean real things, not grilled turkey and cheese sandwiches with blackberry jam or homemade Egg McMuffins or chicken and hummus wraps (some of my favorite staples). Telling myself that I am going to cook more doesn't always translate into action, though, and so I have to be more concrete with my goals, and for quite some time now my concrete goal has been to cook something real and planned once a week (generally on Sundays), which I can then eat for lunches or dinners throughout the rest of the week.

Some weeks this works better than others. Sundays when we have ward mingle everything gets thrown off because I don't have the time or inclination to cook something for myself when I know I'm going to get fed a full meal at the Institute building. Fast Sundays are difficult too, not because of a lack of time (today I didn't have anywhere to be after church at all until the CES fireside at 8) but because when I come home from church around 5, I am starving and don't want to take the time to cook. Other days there is just simply too much going on come Sunday afternoon whether it be FHE or being home taught or having people over for Settlers tournaments or general socializing. Sometimes it helps if I plan to make dinner for people - extra motivation to cook, but also fewer leftovers.

In the last couple months, though, I have discovered that my heretofore underutilized slow cooker is a great solution to some of my cooking-goal-reaching woes. My Sunday mornings are wide open right now while we have afternoon church, and food preparation is a nice, relaxing Sunday morning activity for me. And if I throw the right things into the crock pot, when I come home from church the apartment smells wonderful and I have dinner waiting for me. No matter how much I put into it that morning, at that point it feels effortless.

The other fun thing about the slow cooker is that it's amenable to experimentation. In fact, I don't think I have used an actual recipe since I started using my slow cooker more often. I just think about what sounds good together, toss it all in, and hope for the best. I'll be honest, my efforts so far have been only mildly successful. I've ended up with things that taste just fine, but that I would probably not make again without substantial modification. I've made pork chops twice by pouring pre-bottled marinade over the chops and adding some onions, and the first time it was quite good except for the bell peppers that I added on impulse (they turned mushy), but the second time the pork chops were kind of dry. Last week I made something involving sausage and cabbage and potatoes, and it was a bit watery, but otherwise not half bad. I'll have to experiment more with that one. And today I made a sort of soupy mess with whatever I happened to have on hand - black beans, diced tomatoes, cream of chicken soup, zucchini that I needed to use before it went bad, jarred roasted red peppers, frozen chopped peppers that I also needed to use, Trader Joe's chicken sausage, a jar of chile verde cooking sauce. It's hard to really judge since I ate it at the end of my Sunday fast when almost anything tastes good, but it was not too bad. We'll see what I think by the end of the week when I'm struggling to finish it off.

I'm hoping to someday come up with a brilliant concoction that will take the world, or perhaps the Pillsbury Baking Contest by storm. If I come up with that concoction, you, my privileged readers, will be the first to see the history-making recipe, I promise.