Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)"Slow Cooker: The Best Cookbook Ever" has many excellent recipes and meal ideas, is well laid out, clear, and nicely photographed. Whether it will prove to be the "best cookbook ever" for you probably depends on how you use your slow cooker. I usually turn to mine on busy days when I have little time to cook and will be gone most of the day. I want to quickly combine a few ingredients with minimal fuss, clap the lid on, walk away, and come home eight or ten hours later to a ready-to-eat meal. Unfortunately, many of the recipes in this book require extensive preparation, cook for only three or four hours, and involve the slow cooker almost incidentally.
For example, the Asian Honey Wings, although they sound delicious, are all but finished before the slow cooker even makes an appearance. The wings are cooked in the oven while the sauce is prepared in a bowl, and the sauce and wings are then combined in the slow cooker and heated through. The book suggests serving them from the slow cooker to keep them warm. Heating and serving an already cooked dish from a slow cooker hardly qualifies as a slow-cooker recipe, and I don't really need a book to know that serving from a slow cooker is a good way to keep food warm.
Another typical example is a casserole for which the cook must first make 2 cups of cooked rice; chop several vegetables; have 3 cups of cooked, diced chicken at hand; and grate 2-1/2 cups of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. While the rice simmers on the stovetop, the cook sautés the vegetables in separate steps, then removes them to a bowl and adds several more ingredients to the pan to create a sauce. The rice and some of the vegetables are then combined with half the sauce in one bowl, and the chicken and other vegetables are combined with the rest of the sauce in another bowl. Finally, the rice, chicken, vegetables, and cheese are layered in the slow cooker and heated through. Frankly, if I have time for this level of involvement and kitchen mess, I'm just going to go ahead and cook a meal. Once again, the slow cooker seems to be involved only so this can be called a slow-cooker recipe.
A recipe for enchiladas calls for 17 different ingredients and 10 cooking steps before it is ready for the slow cooker - and then cooks only 3 hours. The cook can neither save time by using the slow cooker nor leave it unattended for the day.
There are some interesting suggestions, such as making snack mix or spiced nuts in the slow cooker in a way that is much simpler than the usual oven recipes. There are good dip recipes; again, no surprise that a slow cooker works well for warm dips, but new ideas for dips are always welcome.
I find myself using this cookbook as more of an idea book than a slow cooker reference. Leafing through, I find a recipe for something I like - cabbage rolls, say - see that it's just as much work as making them in the oven, and decide to make them soon - in the oven. One more thing: All of the recipes are sized for 6 to 10 servings; if you need to adjust the recipe to make fewer, that will add one more step.
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