Selfsufficientish.com

This could be in recipe swap, but I thought I'd post here!

Father Christmas got me the mother of all slow cookers (a biggun'). Has anyone any tried and tested tasty recipes?

TA!

Have a look at this:

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/sho ... er+recipes

Masses of recipes and advice. Somewhere on there is a recipe for a whole chicken slow cooked with wine and garlic, which I tried. If you can find it, it was delicious!

Slow cookers are really economical, as they don't use much more electricity than a lightbulb apparently. Meat comes out really tender too.

careful when putting sweet peppers into slow cookers...they always seemed to turn out bitter in my experience...but if u put them in a bit towards the end, might be ok. just something that stuck to me from as a kid...took the fun out of meals, bitter peppers! have fun with it!

The attraction of slow cookers to me is that they require almost no attention once you've set up the meal. This means you can go to work, go out, hang around and come back later in the evening to a decent meal.

Beef strips and veges work well. Add roughly equal amounts of meat and veges to the pot (chop the veges slightly smaller to make sure they cook) and flavour with soy / BBQ sauce and 1/4 cup of stock. Including onion in the veges will produce a more flavoursome meal. The stock is not necessary if you are using frozen meat, as this will produce more than enough liquid. Put on Low for 6 - 8 hours. When the meat and veg has cooked, boil some rice to serve with it.

When the boyfriend's English relatives came over, his aunt amazed us by stuffing an entire frozen chicken into our very small crockpot and stuffing the chicken with diced onion. The result was served with rice and fed six adults! Note: if you're using frozen foods, don't fill the pot too full and don't add any extra liquid.

Kfish

Thanks for all the tips. I cooked a gammon for Boxing Day in it and it was done to a 'T'. This cooker is definately going to be used a lot!

Some recipes here

http://southernfood.about.com/library/c ... ?once=true&

and there's an e-list

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/slowcooker/

worth joining if only for long enough to help yourself to the file section

The Americans call a slow-cooker a crockpot so if searching the web for recipes type that into a seach engine.

I use mine a fair bit. One thing I use it for every Yule is to do pears in red wine because they can be left to stew away whilst I'm flapping over everything else!

Most casseroles and stews can be adapted to the slow-cooker.

Wassail

Karen

I don't have a slow cooker as such,but I DO have a slow cooker setting on my Gas oven (a basic Flavel 'Festival' model,that I've had for about twenty years now-can't see the point of ovens with timers,whistles and bells etc.)
I use a 'Le Creuset' cast iron pot,browning any meat first on the hob,before adding onions,garlic,herbs and veg. and stock,and transferring to the oven for slow cooking.
I often prepare meals before going to work,which means that I have a 'one pot meal' ready for when I come home without any further preparation.
The other benefit of this type of cooking is that all of the flavour and goodness of the ingredients are preserved.