We were pleasantly surprised when numerous commenters to our What to Eat When You Have No Time to Eat post started mentioning the crockpot — we thought it was our dirty Midwestern secret. But it truly is one of our best tools in the kitchen, and if we’re preparing dinner (beyond boiling water) it’s pretty much all we can manage on work days. (Pictured: Hamilton Beach 33967 Set ‘n Forget 6-Quart Programmable Slow Cooker
If you don’t have one, here are the reasons we love it:
- The food is amazing. Moist, falling apart, delicious. It’s particularly great for recipes involving spices, as they tend to soak in.
- You don’t have to totally know what time you’re coming home. Recipe directions frequently say things like “Cook 6-8 hours on low” — and we often find that if it cooks for 10 hours it’s just fiiiine. (And we have a super old crockpot that does not have a “warm” function.) If a meeting goes long, or if you end up bumping into a friend on the way out, or if you just need another half hour to get home — it’s cool. Whenever you arrive home, dinner will be there waiting for you.
- Prep is, generally, easy. We’re a fan of simple recipes (we’re posting one of our favorites below) that take very little prep — more intricate things exist, but for many recipes the most difficult part is measuring out the spices, which can be done the night before.
- Clean-up is, generally, easy. Particularly with the advent of crockpot liners
, cleanup often consists of a) removing the food to serve you and your family and eating it, b) after dinner, removing the leftovers (if any) and packaging them up, c) discarding the crockpot liner, and d) rinsing the crockpot. Done. No baked-on goo to scrub at, or soak, and the dirty dishes are minimal.
Some possible misconceptions:
- You need a family of four to use one. Nonsense — even if you’re just serving one the leftovers are awesome.
- The food turns to tasteless mush. Again, this is not our experience. Keep in mind, if you want to serve something like chicken cutlets, the crockpot is not your friend — chicken tends to fall apart and shred in the crockpot — but otherwise, how tasty your meal is depends on how tasty the recipe is.
- They’re expensive — not true! Most crockpots are $50-$100. Just make sure you get one with a removable stone container (our very first crockpot, 15 years ago, did not have one) but otherwise, it’s pretty easy.
- You can only make stews. Again, not true. Last night we made the filling for enchiladas — over the weekend we made a whole roast chicken. (The meat was falling off the bone — delicious.) We also frequently make pasta sauce or soup.
- They’ll burn your house down. We admit, the idea of leaving an appliance on all day worries us a bit. But you leave your TV plugged in all day, right? And we have never burned down our house (or heard of anyone else burning theirs down with the crockpot), for what that’s worth.
Readers, what do you love about your crockpot? What is your favorite recipe or recipe source? (Our favorite is after the jump…)
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1. Refrigerator — Yes, we’re putting this in with the gadgets. A tiny fridge is great for the office because you can keep water and soda cool, but you can also keep various low-calorie, healthy items cold — cheese sticks, lemon juice (good for adding flavor to water or as a salad dressing), low-calorie cheese for sandwiches, et cetera. We recommend one that looks classic, can fit on a shelf, and can run off just one plug, such as this 
, available at Amazon for $130.
2. USB Flash Drive. These little guys are great for moving documents back and forth between your office and your home computer — they’re natural carriers for, say, the latest Word and PDF versions of your resume. Available widely for anywhere from $10 to $40, we like brightly colored ones like this 
, available at Amazon.com for $12. We also recommend using 
, available at Amazon for $99. 
. This is similar to PDF Factory, but allows you to create “notebooks” that will be word searchable, printable, e-mailable, and so forth. We primarily find OneNote helpful in working on a project — planning a vacation or a wedding, decorating an apartment — but it’s also helpful in keeping track of restaurant reviews, recipes, articles full of gift ideas, and more. (We also find it useful on an organizational and environmental standpoint, because we now have a single place to put all those articles we used to just print out and leave in various places in our apartments.) Available at Amazon.com for $70.49. (OneNote is frequently included in Microsoft Office bundles — you may find it cheaper to buy such a bundle and upgrade Word, Excel, and other programs.)
. This is pricier than the others, but this software is extremely helpful for those of you who practice the lost art of dictation. Dictating is a great skill to pick up for a variety of reasons — it’s much easier to summarize notes from all-day meetings via dictation, or to make sense of documents as you review them without constantly toggling between screens to be sure you’ve gotten the numbers and quotations exactly correct. (We’ve been using this one for about a month — seriously, it’s a great dictating program.) Available at Amazon for $127.49.
For the busy woman, shopping online is sometimes all the schedule will allow. (Whose bright idea was it to have store hours from 10 AM to 8 PM, anyway?) It’s actually our preferred mode of shopping — so long as we don’t pay for shipping. For some reason, no matter how great of a discount we’re getting on the clothes, we still feel like we’re being swindled if we have to pay shipping. (We’ve come to think of it as a tax for trying things on.)
