Good Taste / April 2007
Slow and Savory
Fast food offers the advantages of convenience, familiarity and low prices but it is short on nutrition, flavor, variety and interest. Fine dining offers delicious flavor, infinite variety, healthy accompaniments and interesting combinations.
However, such niceties usually require restaurant prices, a reservation, a change of attire (or at least fresh makeup) and an interpreter. Plus, there’s the worry of a weirdly wrong choice.
Fortunately, there’s a highly satisfying, eminently practical happy medium between fast food and fine dining-slow cooking.
Slow cookers make deeply flavorful solutions for everyday, and every night, cooks. With just the least bit of planning and the turn of a switch, families can enjoy a wide variety of deliciously different, wholesome, hearty meals in the comfort of their own home and in the comfort zone of their own pocketbook.
Two new cookbooks explore the intriguing options of slow cooking and take it far beyond pot roast. That dimly remembered crockpot in the cupboard can be a heroic appliance that produces stunning and delicious main dishes, side dishes, appetizers and even deserts.
The first, 175 Essential Slow Cooker Classics by Judith Finlayson, is the crème de la crème of slow cooker cookbooks, featuring eighty full color photos, and 300 pages of mouth-watering recipes with unusual twists on old favorites, dramatic presentations and fresh ideas on flavor. It is step-by- step fine dining for family, friends and treasured guests. The author’s recurring recommendation to enhance flavor by browning meats and softening vegetables recipes before cooking is a bit of a surprise, but browning does indeed make a more savory final product.
From Santa Fe Style Ribs to Sweet Potato Barley Risotto to Maple Orange Pudding, the recipes showcase the versatility and artful possibilities of a slow cooker. There are plenty of old favorites but with flair and unexpected flavor, like Saucy Swiss Steak, Shepherd’s Pie with Creamy Corn Filling and yes, even pot roast, but with a deliciously different rich tomato gravy.
Adventuresome cooks can spice up their dinner table preparing Tuscan Chicken with Sage or Dilled Veal Stew. Kids will enjoy the Beef Noodle Casserole and Turkey Sloppy Joes.
The deserts in 175 Essential Slow Cooker Classics range from simple to sublime-Cranberry Baked Apples, Plum Pudding, Blackberry Peach Cobbler, and the ultimate, Chocaberry Cheesecake.
175 Essential Slow Cooker Classics is a classic itself, a cookbook to savor, save and share.
With over 600 recipes, the second book, Fix It and Forget It, 5-Ingredient Favorites, by best-selling author, Phyllis Pellman Good, is a virtual encyclopedia of ideas, tips and suggestions for a busy woman. Each of the recipes, submitted by at-home cooks from around the country, uses just five (or fewer) ingredients and the trusty slow cooker. Many recipes feature prep times of ten minutes or less. Fix It and Forget It holds everything a clever cook needs to answer “What’s for dinner?”
The recipes are easy to read, understand and locate by category, from breakfasts to beef main dishes.
There are numerous options for setting a delicious table, including Salmon Souffle, Beef Ravioli Casserole, Chicken Broccoli Alfredo, Barbecued Black Beans with Sweet Potatoes and Chocolate Soufflé along with appetizers, soups and stews. It’s a family-friendly cook book, with 38 recipes just for potatoes and helpful tips scattered throughout. Ingredients lean to basic, rather than exotic, readily available in the average, hectic kitchen.
There are hearty helpings of humor, too, with recipes for Clean-the Fridge-Monday- Night Soup, Mix-It-and-Run Chicken, and I-Forgot to Thaw the Roast Beef! Don’t miss the Mountain Bike Soup. It lists these directions. “Dump it all in. Put on the lid. Turn it on Low. Go for a long ride on your bike.”
Fix It and Forget It, 5-Ingredient Favorites makes family cooking fun, fast and easy with tasty, home-cooked, well-tested recipes that create lifetime memories from the dinner table. PL
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