Partner and I are always both very hungry when we get home from work, and neither of us wants to spend an hour making something fancy. Or even half an hour. This means we eat lots of soup, lots of pasta, lots of frozen / defrostable things.
But then came the slow cooker.
We bought one in December, and we use it about once a week. We fill it with meat and vegetables and broth in the morning, or the night before, and we turn it on before leaving for work. It produces about as much heat as an Easy-Bake Oven, but it’s steady and relentless. Within a few hours there’s a little simmer going on; by afternoon it’s bubbling steadily. Meat becomes incredibly tender and juicy; vegetables are rendered completely helpless. (Onions are pretty much liquefied.) We bought a big cooker, about the size of a standard bathtub, so we tend to cook three or four pounds of meat at a time, and I invariably double the amount of vegetables called for in any given recipe.
On Friday, in honor of the St. Patrick’s Day season, I did a corned beef brisket. The recipe called for all kinds of interesting seasonings: Worcestershire sauce, mustard, balsamic vinegar, garlic, allspice, brown sugar, tomato sauce. Also green peppers and onions. (No cabbage. Not very Irish, I know, but cabbage really stinks up the house, so that was probably for the best.)
The end result was very nice. The brisket was fall-apart tender; the onions and peppers were succulent. I made some gravy out of the broth and a little cornstarch, and it was nice too. (A local Irish pub has introduced us to “champ,” which is just mashed potatoes with chopped spring onions; I’ve started using cream instead of milk in my mashed potatoes, because it makes a real difference, and hey, you only live once. Anyway, I made a side dish of champ. Also very nice.
From Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn”: “The widow rung a bell for supper, and you had to come on time. When you got to the table you couldn't go right to eating, but you had to wait for the widow to tuck down her head and grumble a little over the victuals, though there warn't really anything the matter with them, -- that is, nothing only everything was cooked by itself. In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better.”
(Most people, when they write about food, describe elegant recipes and elaborate techniques and exotic ingredients.)
(I write about slow cookers and Jell-O and fishsticks.)
(I’m a natural for the Food Network, aren’t I?)
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