Slow cooking brings out delicious flavor
By AMY MENDENHALL amendenhall@newsandsentinel.comArticle Photos
I recently have found a new style of cooking I'm practically obsessed with - the slow cooker. Why it took me so long to discover the joys of this device, I'll never know, but my enthusiasm has me seeking out every recipe I can to make meal time easier.
For the uninitiated, let me explain why this device makes me happy - get up in the morning, throw a few ingredients into the pot, and when you get home from work, dinner is ready. How is that not fabulous? And anything you make at home is going to taste better than a frozen dinner, I guarantee it. My only problem thus far is that my slow cooker is quite small, but hopefully that is something Santa can remedy this year!
This brings me to my excitement over "Slow Cooker: The Best Cookbook Ever" by Diane Phillips with photographs by James Baigrie. Phillips is a cooking teacher and author of more than 14 cookbooks. This book contains more than 400 recipes for your slow cooker. It's slow cooker heaven, with recipes laid out into chapters - soups and chilies, casseroles, chicken and turkey, fish, beef, pork, lambs, side dishes, vegetables, sauces, desserts and party foods. Many chapters are then further divided according to ingredients - casseroles breaks down into noodles, rice and tortillas; beef into round, sirloin, brisket, ground beef, flank steak, short ribs, veal and veal stews; pork into shoulder, loin, tenderloin, ribs, sausage and ham; lamb into leg, shanks, shoulder and ground lamb; sides into rice, risotto, pilaf, bread stuffings and grits; sauces into gravies, sauces, sweet and saucy and jams; desserts into regular desserts and puddings and party foods into drinks, appetizers, main courses, breakfast, egg casseroles, side dishes and desserts. The beginning of each chapter also contains some tips and an index of each recipe contained within, so its easy to skim through and find what sounds good to you under a particular ingredient or course.
There's different styles of cooking as well - from Mexican with Chicken Tortilla Soup and Chicken Enchiladas with Ranchero Sauce to Italian with Meatballs Italiano and Risotto alla Milanese or try something different like Mediterranean Beef Rolls, North African Beef Stew, Tandoori Chicken and Jamaican Jerk Pork Tenderloin in Mango Sauce. There's some mouth-watering desserts as well, like Hot Fudge Upside-Down Cake, Cappuccino Bread Pudding and Crock-Baked Apples.
The introduction of the book also contains a helpful guide of things to stock in your pantry, refrigerator and spices, so you don't have to be like me and inevitably go running out to pick something up you forgot.
I am a fan of Indian food in general and curry, but haven't been able to get my kids to like it. So I took a sneaky and mild-flavoring attempt to get them started in that direction by making "Curried Chicken Divan," a recipe that makes use of a lot of cheddar cheese (one of their favorite things) and introduces them to curry powder.
Prep was easy for this recipe - so easy in fact, that my youngest helped - just make a curry sauce using butter, flour, curry, chicken broth and evaporated milk and then pour over boneless, skinless chicken breast halves already in the slow-cooker. Put the lid on and cook on high for three hours. Go run errands, play games with the kids or make a cake (as I did.) Come back, add a bunch of cheese (my kids' theory is the cheesier the better) and let cook for another hour. Watch television, read a book, or ice the cake (as I did.) Then come back ready to enjoy! The recipe recommended making the broccoli on the side, so I just microwaved some frozen broccoli, cooked up some boil-in-the-bag rice, and served it all together. Easy and so delicious! The chicken is so tender and the sauce is excellent over the rice and broccoli. My youngest loved the "yellow rice" and would have easily made a meal of just that. Now if only I can get them to move from curried chicken to chicken curry.
"Slow Cooker: The Best Cookbook Ever" is published by Chronicle Books. It is $24.95.
