Sunday, June 1, 2014

Slow Cooker Sundays

For the last six months or so, most Sundays around here have been dubbed Slow Cooker Sunday.  It just seems right to lazily throw a few ingredients into the crock pot and let it go to work for six or eight hours.  You start things in late morning, set it on low, and go about whatever business or pleasure that's happening that day.

There's a great cookbook (actually two...volumes one and two) which is published by the folks at  America's Test Kitchen.  I have a few of their books and really like them for a couple of different reasons.  First, they take a scientific approach to cooking, testing, retesting, and trying different combinations and variations.  It's not unusual for them to try 50 different things to yield one recipe.  The second reason is that you not only get a tried and tested recipe, they take the time to explain WHY it works.

So I highly recommend Slow Cooker Revolution (Volumes 1 and 2).  And being a Mexican food fanatic I also use a book called The Mexican Slow Cooker by Deborah Schneider.

The dish below was actually made using neither of these resources, but was found by BowlingWidow at WinCo Foods while shopping there.  Still, it turned out great and occupies an honorable place in our recipe file.

Here are Cauldron Carnitas:



The ingredients are anxious to get going
 
Ready for eight hours of slow cooking

It's ready!


The finished dish (with habanero salsa of course)

2 comments:

  1. Americas Test Kitchen and Cooks Country and the best cookings shows on TV- watch them all the time. We also have the series cook books and have tried numerous recipes and they have all been great. Nice post Joe.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks, Bob. Another thing I do is check out the ATK season videos from the library. The newer seasons have .pdf files of every recipe, so I capture them for free. It may be morally wrong but in the interest of cooking great dishes I'm willing to overlook that.

    ReplyDelete