On Black Friday, Karen brought this Rival crock pot home for $13. She even made a hazardous trip to (don’t judge us) Walmart on the biggest shopping day of the year to land this bargain. We’ve used it several times and most everything it’s produced was barely edible. Recipes followed to the letter were off in some way every time. Ad-libbed concoctions that should be good tasted muddy and blah. I know these slow cookers are fashionable throwbacks to the 70s, but I’m about to throw mine back to the 70s.
Sure, I could spend more time reading the big crock pot blog that people swear by. I could survey all of the vegetarians out there for best practices of slow cookery. But, that seems like it’s contradicting the purpose of the crock pot to begin with: THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE EASY. Throw stuff in the pot and come back hours later to a delicious meal. Make it fast. Make it slow, as the infamous crock pot blogger says. Who wants to spend loads of time researching, much less wading through this trial and error period? I know, I’m going to the trouble to write this, so I must be willing to invest some extra time, but this is (as with many of my blogs) a venting session in the hopes of gathering knowledge and correcting some of my own ignorance.
Some of the reviews of our model of crock pot say that it’s too hot and renders everything inside into flavorless much. The four settings don’t seem to affect the temperature, instead acting only as a timer. That could be part of the problem. My coworker tells me that the best thing to make in a crock pot is meat. Okay. Now this vegetarian is relegated to “not the best” whenever I cook in a crock pot. Great. What to do? I’ll turn this over to you.
Try some of the recipes from Youvegotsupper.com, they have plenty of crockpot experience. My limited uses are vegetable chili (the Silver Palate Cookbook), chicken puttanesca, and bbq pork. It’s not a food snob (and I mean that in the nice way) appliance, but plenty of people who are busy working parents with limited time find it to be a life-saver.
I use mine for making a big batches of tomato sauce. You can get an industrial can of whole tomatoes, run them through a food mill and use this as a base for sauce, which you continue to cook and season in the crock on low while you are at work. Some of the ingredients, for instance if you add garlic or tomato paste to your sauce, have to be cooked on the stove first and then added to the crockpot.
Cost for crockpot full of sauce (including the other ingredients;evoo, paste, etc..) is about $4.80.
Freeze half of the sauce in serving size containers and use the other half as a base for other sauces,for example, add pancetta for alamatriciana; add eggplant and golden raisins for a veg. sauce; bake some marinara w/ cubed butternut squash, onion and white wine and serve over pasta or rice with ricotta or eat as chunky soup; make a lasagana or a pizza; add fresh tuna or shrimp and some olives olives; whew! I think you got more than you wanted with this comment. I use “Crocky” a lot.
OK, I don’t use my crock pot nearly as much since I stopped eating meat, but…soup, chili, spaghetti sauce and oatmeal (overnight in the tiny sized crock pot, steel cut grains) have all been successful for me. I have heard that one can do stuffed squash in the crock pot, but I haven’t tried it yet.
Oh! I also use it to cook dry beans. No soaking or anything. Just rinse and toss them in!
Made beans in the crock pot today for use in a white bean bisque. Kept adding water all day as they drank it up repeatedly.
Emailed Rival about their crockpot. No response.
I tend to buy whatever Cook’s Illustrated tells me to and I’ve yet to be disappointed. I’ll see if I can’t dig up their recommendation for a slow cooker if you’re interested.
Forget the crockpot. Le Creuset, while more expensive, is so much better. Crockpots are only good for heating up meals for pot-lucks at work.