The wherefors and whyhows of crock pot cooking

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They say diamonds are a girl’s best friend. That may be true, but I’d like to think that the crock pot is a mom’s best friend. You fill it in the morning with ingredients in as short a time as possible, and dinner miraculously appears ready for the table without your having to stand in a kitchen for hours on end. Even better, it’s a great way to make dinner during the summer months without heating up the kitchen.

So, what are the basics of crock pot cooking?

  1. Figure out what types of things you want to make: soups and stews can go in any shape crock pot, but turkey breasts or whole small chickens require oval pots. Even the old faithful, pot roast, can easily fill a round crock pot and perhaps require an oval.
  2. Think about how many people you’re trying to serve with your dishes: 4qt crock pots are perfect for making dishes that run in the 4-6 serving range, but you’ll want to step up to a 5 or 6qt crock pot if you want to make a meal for more (or generate a load of leftovers).
  3. Consider what features you want: simpler crock pots have only three settings (OFF, LOW and HIGH); fancier ones may have a KEEP WARM setting and/or may have a timer to switch from your cooking temp to the warm setting.

Beyond that, it comes down to the basics of what you want to make and how to fit that into your schedule. With perhaps a few exceptions, cooking on LOW should be about twice the amount of time you need to cook on HIGH. So, if you suddenly realize at 2pm that you forgot to start your crock pot (and you’re home, not at work or out), you can probably kick that puppy up to HIGH and let it go until dinnertime.

Cooking times are also usually heavily related to the type of thing you’re cooking. Meats vary wildly (often 6-9hrs for chicken breasts or thighs, 9-11hrs for turkey breasts or whole small chickens, 10-12hrs for large cuts of beef and/or ribs).

What about the safety of cooking meats? Will the crock pot heat evenly? Will my meats dry out or possibly not cook thoroughly?

OK – all good concerns, but the typical cook-the-tar-out-of-it style of crock pot cooking (where you leave something in to braise for anywhere from 6-9+ hours) will generally handle this. You can help things out by defrosting meats before they go into the crock pot. You don’t have to defrost all the way, and some things can be put in as frozen bricks…but doing at least some defrosting can help a ton. In my many years of crock pot cooking, I have yet to run into any kind of illness related to meats being improperly cooked. I can say that meats can dry out, so maintaining an appropriate moisture level is really important. And, as they say, YMMV, so make sure that you see crock pot cooking as experimental. It’s like cooking with any other recipe. Why not add fresh mushrooms? Why not add a little hot sauce?

Consider the crock pot yet another way to shave time less-well-spent off the day if you’re already in a hurry (or just need to keep a meal really low-key). Most of the crock pot recipes I plan to post require less than 15mins of prep time. Honestly, I just don’t have the time to prep things for an hour…at that point, I’d rather just spend the time cooking and get my Julia Child on, if you know what I mean.

Crunchy? Metro? Hunh?

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When I was pregnant with dd just a few years ago, I joined an online community of preggos. It was there that I learned abbreviations like dh, ds, dd, etc. It was like learning a whole other language. I also learned that some moms were firmly in the “crunchy” camp or the “metro” camp. I couldn’t make heads or tails of this at first, but then I picked it up rather easily. To over-simplify:

 

“Crunchy” moms…cloth diaper, breastfeed exclusively, rear face until the child is well past age 1 or 2, make their own baby food, etc.

“Metro” moms…use “sposies” (disposable diapers), formula feed exclusively, turn the kid front-facing as soon as possible, buy Gerber off the shelf, etc.

 

Looking at these two options was like picking Democrat vs Republican: this is all I get to pick from? I can either be a Kinsey 0 or a Kinsey 6? For reals? It made no sense to me.

 

So, like much of my life, I picked what worked for me. Luckily, I found a group of like-minded preggos and we formed a small island of sanity in an otherwise overly hormonal discussion board. Eventually, we bugged out to our own private boards, just to get away from the crazies (who had taken to cannibalism by then).

 

Thus, we get to where I stand, or at least where I went: I use disposable diapers (I’ll get into that later); I pumped as much as I could when neither kid would feed directly from me, and when that wasn’t enough, I supplemented with formula; I turned my kids front-facing around 18mos because (at the time) it was a perfectly okay thing to do; I bought Gerber and felt no twinge of guilt.

 

I fully support a mom’s decision to breastfeed (bf) or not, because it’s HER decision based on what SHE feels she can manage. Things were different years ago, when I was a baby, and my mom had nowhere to pump at work (and mechanical pumps only existed in hospitals). Disposable diapers weren’t yet invented then. Formula was all the rage, so she bf’ed me before and after work, and I got formula during the day. You do what you can, and you do what works for you. You work it out with your pediatrician to make sure that it’s all safe for your kiddo, and that’s about that.

 

So, that’s where I’m coming from (and, obviously, the genesis of this blog’s name). I don’t believe that any one way is THE way to go, and I incorporate the bits of philosophy that work for me and my family, and I adjust as I go. I encourage others to do so…because life on the extremes isn’t nearly as much fun – or interesting – as playing in the middle.

…and so it begins

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A couple friends of mine suggested that I start a blog. I’ve done private blogging before, but never public blogging, so we’ll have to see if I can keep up with it. I can make a few promises:

1. I will try to post as many recipes as I can, based on what works for me and/or my family, although I will warn you now that I skew towards crock pot recipes, because they do make life 1000x easier.

2. I may mention things about stuff I do for work, but I don’t talk about my work. I won’t discuss my employer. YES, I have a full-time job, and NO I’m not a mouthpiece for my employer. They’re not associated with my blog and my blog is not associated with them, so let’s all keep it that way, shall we?

3. I do have a family, but I have no particular desire to regale you with all the details of their lives; I’d like for them to have some modicum of privacy. If I speak about them, they will be dh (dear husband), dd (dear daughter) and ds (dear son).

Now, to the stuff I do like and do plan to talk about: cooking (especially crock pot cooking), soccer, random bits of finance, things I do in Excel, movies and music that I’m totally into…in other words, things that are random but that give a general sense of who I am and what I like. If that works for you, fantastic. If not, there are about 1 million other blogs out there that you can gorge on.