Let me tell you why the crock pot will save you money, improve your health, and make cooking easy and fun. The humble crock pot, or slow cooker, is essentially an electrical Dutch oven. A ceramic or porcelain pot sits inside a heating element that heats the pot at a consistent low temperature. The crock pot is designed to safely cook foods for six or more hours, unattended. During the 70s, these cookers were introduced as substitutes of regular cooking equipment available at that time. Crock pots (as they were better known back then) were used as a piece of kitchen equipment which was helpful in keeping food warm and fresh for long hours. Finally, you’ll find cooking with a crockpot can easily be done in the morning before work on busy days. Prepare your vegetables and other ingredients, throw them into the crock pot, and turn it on. Compare this to the time it would take to cut everything up after work, often using both the stove and the oven and possibly even the microwave. For example, a basic roast simply calls for one onion, peeled and quartered; a scrubbed and washed carrot, roughly chopped (you don’t even have to peel the carrot if you don’t want to); potatoes, cut into halves or quarters (the skins are delicious when cooked under the slow heat of a crock pot); a tender chuck roast, washed; herbs and seasoning of your choice; and a cup of water or broth. The best thing about the crock pot recipes is that even though they take 8 hours to get cooked, in that 8 hours you don’t care at all what happens to the food. Because it can’t get burned. The recipes are also very delicious. This is because the seasoning has enough time to fully combine with the meat.
These recipes haven’t been that popular in the past. Maybe this is because the crock pots used to be expensive. But now it’s not the case. These recipes are the new wave in cooking. The reason why nutrition is preserved in food cooked using slow cookers is that the food is cooked using indirect heat from the heating elements, which builds up slowly. Thus, the food is cooked naturally, at an optimum pace, thereby providing the best in taste as well as health.
