Slow cooking

Just want you all to know that I am LOVIN' my slow cooker (thanks again to my father for the Christmas present!!). I've been mainly going through recipes in Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook by Beth Hensperger and Julie Kaufmann. Last night night I tried slow cooker bbq ribs for the first time, using bbq sauce gifted to me by Margaret Middleton when she heard I bought a slow cooker:



OH MY! Prep was so ridiculously easy that I feel like I'm cheating somehow: basically dump the ribs into the cooker with the sauce, and cook on the LOW setting all day. By dinnertime, the meat is so tender it literally falls off the bone.

Now I'm starting to look through The Healthy Slow Cooker by Judith Finlayson as well, and was delighted to find a slow cooker recipe for steel cut oatmeal for my size of slow cooker (3.5 quart). As I've mentioned before, I'm a big fan of steel cut oatmeal and have been having it most mornings, often with dried cranberries or fresh fruit thrown in. In fact, both cookbooks have lots of hot cereal recipes, so I'm going to start experimenting with those for breakfast; I love the idea of waking to a hot breakfast waiting.



I'm also working up the nerve to try some of the other kinds of dishes in my slow cooker books, like soups, vegetarian dishes, and desserts. Baking cake in a slow cooker? Who would have thought it possible?!? Some may ask, "why not in an oven?" but the advantage of using a slow cooker is that I can go out on errands or for a run while it's baking, something I wouldn't be comfortable doing while using a regular oven.

I also have a yummy-sounding crockpot honey wheat bread recipe from "halfmoon_mollie" that I'm looking forward to trying. My friend Allison recently bought a slow cooker, and I've been combing her message boards for other ideas. Like this scrumptious-sounding recipe for North Carolina Pork BBQ from Rob Wynne.

And while I'm on the topic of food, I have to rave about Chow.com. Foodies should definitely check out this site, which is nicely designed and packed with all kinds of useful info. I was delighted to find a video section, where you can SEE experts trussing chickens, poaching eggs, etc.

Ok, I'm hungry now. :-)

Speaking of slow cooking, I originally created this cartoon to post at the top of today's Blathering, but decided to post it in Inkygirl instead as my weekly Cartoon Caption Challenge:



You can see what captions people have come up with as well as post your own by going to Inkygirl.

I'm still enjoying checking out Facebook. I like the fact that there are a wide range of Privacy options (what other people can and can't see) and I REALLY like the capability of threaded conversations via the "Wall-to-Wall" feature. One of the frustrating things about Livejournal is that an interesting thread starts up between two people but then is often abandoned as soon as there's a new post.

In Facebook, you can always click on "Wall-to-Wall" to see a conversation correctly interleaved, no matter what its length may be, and even if other people post about other things in between. This also makes it possible to have a Facebook "conversation" even if each person only posts every once in a while.

Back to writing...







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