When my gentleman friend and I moved in together, there were some things we made decisions about so we wouldn’t have duplicates: we would keep my bed, his toaster, etc.  But there are a few things we have two of: keyboards, guitars, copies of “How to Cook Everything”…

And Crock Pots.

Yes, we have two Crock Pots, and we love them.  Recently we’ve been trying to use them more often, making at least one meal a week crock-style.  This has several benefits.

1.    Many Crock Pot meals use few ingredients, which means they’re easy to prepare.
2.    Slow cooking allows you to use cheaper cuts of meat, or to just use meat as a flavoring.
3.    It’s pretty fool proof, so it makes us feel better about investing in, say, a roast if we know we probably won’t screw it up.
4.    By the time we drag our poor tired bods home from work on the train, dinner is ready!

However, we’ve also come to realize that just because you CAN make something in the Crock Pot, that doesn’t mean you SHOULD.  Crock Pots are great for meals that benefit from slow cooking, or for meals that can cook for 8+ hours so that you can start them at breakfast and they’ll be ready for dinner.  But there is an awkward set of recipes that take four or five hours and could be easily made sans Crock Pot in one or two hours.  For example, Veggie Lasagna.  The lasagna turned out well enough, but I could only make it on the weekend, since it only took 5 hours, and I could have put it together in a lasagna pan and had it ready in under two just by cooking it in the oven.

Therefore, we are setting out to find great recipes that make full use of our Crock Pots without using them unnecessarily.  If you find yourself jonesing for a Crock Pot of your own, you can easily get one for under $40 at Target.  Here’s what I made today:

Beef and Potatoes with Rosemary (from Betty Crocker’s Slow Cooker Cookbook)

We used a bone-in chuck roast that we ordered through our CSA from Lewis Waite farms (more on the CSA soon…).

Other than that, it was just chopping some potatoes and rubbing some mustard and herbs on the roast.  It cooked for 8 hours, and by the time my gentleman friend came home, it was ready to eat.  It came out really tender and not at all dry, and we have plenty of leftovers.  Hooray for Crock Pots!