Slow Cooker Recipes for Beginners: 55 Fast and Easy Slow Cooker Recipes to Lose Weight Fast
The "new" name is "slow
cooker" but most of us know the device as a "crockpot" because
that's the name it was first marketed under a couple of decades ago. If you're
like me, you got one because you thought, "Hey, I can put in the
ingredients in the morning and have a tasty meal when I get home from work -
cool". Then you found out that only certain recipes seemed to work well in
the crockpot, er, slow cooker. You bought crockpot cookbooks, and found while
many of them were beautifully designed with multiple and elaborate fonts, blank
spaces for notes, line drawings of cute little collections of vegetables, the
recipes either contained about 20 different ingredients or else the recipe
required so much pre-browning, pre-sautéing, post-blending, post-broiling of
the ingredients that it would just be quicker to cook the darn recipe once you got
home from work.
I am really happy
to say that slow cooker for beginners is the first sensible slow
cooker cookbook in my collection of them. The book is very well designed. There
is a page devoted to each recipe, and most recipes have a picture of the finished
product. There is a list of ingredients, and from what I saw, everything there
is available in my local supermarket.
As I read through
the recipes, I found myself thinking, "that sounds really tasty" and
more importantly, "I can do that". The recipes include both standards
and favorites, you know, the kind of food that you would actually cook at home
(or order in a favorite restaurant) and that your family would actually eat.
The recipes are not just reprints of older crockpot recipes; they have reworked
some basics and created totally new versions of others. There is not a lot of
elaborate pre-preparation in these recipes. Sensibly, they recommend using the
microwave to pre-cook some of the vegetables to both make sure they'll cook
thoroughly in the recipe and to release more of the aromatics into the recipe.
We're talking like five minutes in the microwave, so that's no big hardship.
Some of the recipes do call for browning or sautéing certain meats or
vegetables; I suppose there is no real way to avoid that since the name of the
game is adding flavor to a process whose innate nature would tend to lose the
flavor of some ingredients due to the long cooking time.
This is a good and useful gifting item.
The kindle version of the book will be free for download from Amazon between February 15 - February 17. Doing the review before this date with the mention that the book will be free can make your followers very happy for such an offer.
