Kitchen

[Q-Checker]

I am a huge fan of cooking with slow cookers. I use a six quart one and often freeze leftovers. While there are many good slow cooker cook books out there, I think the best ones are the three by Stephanie O'Dea. It is hard to pick which one of the three I like the best, but if illustrations are important to you, the last one has lovely photographs. All contain healthy recipes with simple ingredients that yield really amazingly delicious results. What more could you ask? Maybe the forthcoming fourth slow cooker cookbook of recipes that use only five ingredients per recipe? And did I mention that there are humorous footnotes throughout the books and that the recipes are either gluten-free or suggest gluten-free subsitutes for some of the ingredients.

[chickenbutt]

Hey, Noel, my friend! As soon as I got up and got online I saw an email that you were calling me. Sorry I missed you yesterday. I got off the computer shortly after posting in that one thread in VP.

Well, this is probably one area where I'm just not the expert as far as cooking goes. I do have a Crock Pot, but haven't used one in years.

You will get good information on this subject from many of the other ladies here. As far as ease goes, you will definitely benefit from using a slow cooker. It's pretty much - brown the meat, dump in the rest of the stuff, and put the lid on. Or, well , I guess a lot of people don't even brown the meat but I would highly recommend it if you want a MUCH better result.

I know you like fresh ingredients so I'd definitely avoid using cans of soup as an ingredient. Probably the people who know me from this forum are laughing their butts off at me talking about Crock Pots and cooking with canned soup (I know you are, Sooner!). hehe

Anyhoo, wishing you the best and hope you are able to make some tasty food with a lot less work. I know that as we get on, and as the immune system diseases progress, it sure is harder and harder to do regular cooking. I don't even know how many more years I will be able to do the Thanksgiving thing. I'm up to FOUR days of shopping, prep, and work, and by Thursday I'm still wishing for death. But I'll plug away as long as I can. It's very satisfying to create an amazing meal.

I'm probably a bit of a masochist at this point but, and as much as it causes me excessive pain and fatigue, I still go old school with the cooking. I want the best I can manage to create so I do the work. You probably have it worse than I, however, so I can imagine it's time to try and find shortcuts. I'm sure my time will come for that, too!

I always liked cooking. Heck, I've been cooking for 54 of my 60 (argh - still not comfortable saying that number) years. I used to teach home cooking when I lived in Germany and really loved teaching others how to make great food. But there comes a time when we cannot do all we want to do. I sure understand that!