Hmm … you know what? This thread is motivating me to try crockpottery. I need more barbecue brisket in my life. 
Can anyone recommend a good crockpot, suitable for the conversion of raw brisket into dinner? I’d mostly be cooking for myself, but I’ve no gripes with living off leftovers for a few days. Cheaper is better than pricier, but a plate of brisket at the barbecue place down the street is about $10 a pop, so it’d pay for itself soon enough.
I have this one. It also comes with that wee little crock thing, which is good for warm dips!
I don’t know–you’ll have to try it and report back.
Next time I make it, I think I’ll try adding some half-and-half just before serving to see what it’s like with a creamy base. (but it’s already great with the clear broth)
I can’t use half-and-half obviously. Perhaps rice juice or soy juice will work.
I see a Crock Pot full of chicken soup in next month’s menu.
If you like hot cereal, we’re finding the crock-pot is a great way to fix steel-cut oats. I use the “bain marie” approach where I add some water to the crock, and set the cereal ingredients in a glass bowl inside the crock. Using that indirect approach avoids the burned-on-glop result that a modern slow-cooker is likely to produce
I would concur. The oval ones might fit a roast more easily depending on the shape, but my big 6 quart round one handles a whole turkey breast quite nicely. I seem to recall having done a whole chicken in there too.
A smaller round one might not work as well for such a use.
And of course an oval one would work very well for soups / stews.
I don’t cook. I eat out too much.
How much does it cost to use a crock pot to cook? I assume the food bill goes down because you are making leftovers as well.
After getting the groceries, how much prep time goes into getting the average dish into the crock?
The prep time really depends on what you’re making and how much effort you want to put into it. You can brown most meats before placing in the crockpot, but you don’t have to. You can saute your onions and/or garlic and other things before, too, but you don’t have to. If you’re making chili or lasagna or something else with hamburger, you’ll need to cook it first, and maybe sausage depending on how greasy it is. There are so many recipes, varying from throw-it-in-and-set-it-and-forget-it to hours of prep time, I imagine.
Thanks. Another thought is that the prep time for the leftovers is pretty much nil.
I’ve been considering getting a slow cooker, but since I’ve never had one I’ve never felt the lack of one. I also have VERY limited counter space.
I was at Walmart and saw a 2 quart model. I’m wondering if that would work out for me. There’s only two of us. I’m thinking it would be useful for making homemade broth, which for my uses a single quart would be ample. I could also probably do a small roast in there, correct?
Or am I totally off base on this?
I use my round cooker for making stock all the time. I throw in some bones and vegetable trimmings, enough water to cover, and let everything simmer for at least 8 hours.
I think that my round cooker will hold about 3 or 4 pounds of bones (cut or broken, so the marrow is exposed), plus a couple of onions’ worth of onion skins, and some other oddments. If you like, you can freeze the onion skins until you are ready to use them, and the same with carrot peelings and celery trimmings. Usually I just toss in a rib of celery, broken up. I use the large outside ribs, and save the inner ribs, the hearts, for munching on when I get up in the middle of the night and want something to crunch.
I have to either use my gravy defatter or let the strained stock cool in the fridge for a while, because bones seem to have a lot of fat in them. I have to admit that I brown the meat pieces in the reserved fat, and also the diced onion and celery, before I add them to the stock for cooking. My grandparents would be horrified to learn that I routinely throw out the fat from my meat, as they used it in cooking all the time…but I don’t need to eat that animal fat, and I really should do the browning in EVOO, but I prefer the meaty flavor that the animal fat gives.
Think I might hit the library and do some research on slow cooking, I’m sure they have books on it. With money so tight I really need to make sure purchases are cost effective.
Part of the appeal of the 2 quart model was it’s small size, I actually have room for it in my very small kitchen.
I should probably note that bones can really smell nasty when they’re cooking, but they will still make very tasty stock.
You don’t have to put the slow cooker in your kitchen. You can plug it in anywhere there’s an outlet, and it will be fine. In the summer time, my mother used to fill up the cooker in the morning, put it in the far end of the house, and let it do its thing all day. This enabled her to prevent heating up the kitchen. Slow cookers don’t use much heat, but on a muggy day, it’s preferable to avoid as much heat as possible. I’ve set my cooker going in our garage when I didn’t want any heat buildup, too. So, you can put the cooker in the bedroom, or living area, or wherever you want it, it doesn’t HAVE to stay in the kitchen. You just need to fill it up, and let it cook. You don’t have to stir it, and you usually don’t have to add ingredients.
I’ve seen slowcookers in thrift stores…I don’t know that I’d buy one without checking to see that it does heat up, but I’ve seen them in those places, for very reasonable prices.
I cooked a joint of gammon in ours on Christmas eve - soak the gammon in cold water for at least an hour, to remove some of the salt, then put it in the slow cooker with fresh water to cover a half to two thirds of the piece of meat. A few bayleaves, a chopped onion and a sprig of rosemary too.
When the gammon was cooked, I lifted it out (carefuly, as it will just fall apart) and put it in a metal dish, spooned apricot jam over it and gave it half an hour in the oven. It comes out so tender that it’s impossible to carve hot, but I just shredded it with two forks and put all the shredded meat in a dish for the table. Very nice.
I’ve got the smaller 4 qt round one (almost exactly like the one in diosa’s link, except round), and it’s perfect. A smaller roast (3-4ish pounds) fits easily in there and we get four meals out of it - two that night and two for leftovers. It cost me $20 at Target a couple of years ago.
Larger roasts will fit in there too, it just might take a bit of finagling.
Broomstick, I think it’d be a worthwhile investment - they really are convenient, and like **Lynn **said, you can plug it in anywhere you’ve got a spare outlet. (I do realize that storage space might still be an issue.) Perhaps you can find one at a yard sale or some such?
So, I had to go look it up. Here’s mine, from Target. Still $20, it seems. (And I still think mine is one of the Crock Pot brand, but I’m probably misremembering.)
This one’s bare bones (it doesn’t have a timer or warming features or whatnot), but it gets the job done well.
Seconded. My first one was a hand-me-down, but I loved it so much that I bought a new one when the first one died. I love that it can make cheap raw materials into fabulously tasty meals, safely and unattended, with almost no effort. Things like dry beans or cheap chuck roast are magically transformed into slow-food wonders with maybe a few onions and the magic of time. I used to use mine a lot to slow-cook, say, pot roast overnight because I had time to do the prep work in the evening after work; then, in the morning, I’d transfer the cooked roast to a container and put it in the fridge before I left in the morning, and just reheat it when I got home. (The funny part was the cat, who would be confused by the aroma of nice beefy dinner cooking when I was asleep. He’d wake me up to beg for a treat, but by then I was usually about to get up anyway.)
Of course, if you’re a bit more organized and you have room in the fridge for a removable crock, you can prep the ingredients and put them in the crock overnight, and in the morning just stick the crock into the machine, turn it on, and go about your business, and then have the joy of coming home to the aroma of a lovely slow-cooked dinner. One old friend of mine, who was raised by a working single mom, said if not for the Crock-Pot, he had no idea how his mom would have managed to get a hot dinner on the table for him and his brother when they were kids. It’s a few bucks of investment upfront, but IMO so worth it.
I made this last night- I used the wrong cut (Bottom instead of Top Round?) I think, so it did not shred but it was tender and delicious, we made burritos out of it, might do tostadas tonight.
Here’s a dumb question: what’s a “gammon”? I am not familiar with the term.
There’s not much room elsewhere in the place, either.
I won’t buy a used electrical appliance of that nature. I did get a Walmart gift card this holiday season, and the givers were quite generous with the amount. I could easily purchase a small slow cooker with it, I was just ruminating over whether or not it would be a good investment and if I’d have a place to put it. As it is, my toaster and my dehydrator are both packed away because there is simply no room for them anywhere. Except, of course, if I clean off counter space for their use. I’m still going through years of stuff in my house, what I inherited from my parents, and so forth. I sent another pile of stuff off to Goodwill this week and threw more out and yet you’d never guess it by looking at the place!
Between that, and com batting our current rodent invasion, I’ve been quite busy of late… which might be all the more reason to purchase a slow cooker, because I’d love to be able to ladle out a one-pot meal after a day of cleaning/organizing/tossing rather than having to prepare a “fast cook” dinner.
I was curious too - had heard the term and knew it was some sort of meat but I thought it was some sort of mutton. Apparently it’s a kind of ham:
http://www.asianonlinerecipes.com/rss/item/1081