Slow cooker recipes

Lemon pepper chicken in a slow cooker:

Take four large breasts of chicken and trim any remaining fkin or fat off.
Squeeze half a lemon
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Place chicken in the slow cooker. Squeeze lemon juice over the chicken. Sprinkle on the pepper. Cover and cook on low for 6 to 8 hours. Add more lemon juice if needed.

Pork au vin
mushrooms
pork steak
red and green peppers cut into strips
red wine
paprika
worcester sauce
tomatoes tin

Mix everything together. You can save money by getting those strange looking mushrooms which are cheapest, don't buy a lot as a couple thinly sliced will go a long way.
Wine - this can make this dear if you're opening a bottle just for this but *a great money saving hint* is to freeze dregs of leftover wine in ice cubes and then throw a couple in to recipes as needed.
Buy economy peppers (Or visit the greengroce where you'll find fruit loads cheaper)
Buy a cheap cut of pork but not too fatty. Again if you're bulking with veggies add more mushrooms and have less pork as the mushrooms will be cheaper per pound!
Tinned tomatoes are ALWAYS cheapest if you buy them unchopped. Takes about 10 seconds to chop them!

paprika
worcester sauce
Seasoning
red wine - see above for hint
Water to make up liquid
Assortment of veg - whatever is cheap and in season.
Meat - cut into smaller pieces

If it needs thickening towards end add cornflour and water miux and cook for another 1/2 to 1 hour.

just put the joint in with 1 pint water. Large piece of meat should take about 8 hours, always check your instruction book for an indication of time.
Can put veggies under the meat

Butter the inside of the cooking pot. Add 400ml milk, 150ml evaporated milk, 50g pudding rice, 50g sugar. Stir and cook for 4-5 hours.

Take a piece of lamb - most slow cooker recipes suggest browning the meat first before putting it in the slow cooker. Cut into small pieces, place with chopped vegetables and potatoes, add stock, herbs and anything you’d add in to a normal lamb stew.

The recipe is simple - or as complicated as you want it to be. Anything you can do on a low simmer in the oven or in a saucepan can be done in a slow cooker so feel free to experiment. As long as you follow the basic rules of a slow cooker, ie: the right amount of liquid, browning meat where necessary then you’ll find most things will work. If things don’t turn out quite how you want them to then why not give the dish French name?

I will be trying some recipes over the next few weeks and letting you know how well I get on.

Stew is one of the few dishes I remember my mother making when I was a child. I remember it mostly because she used to cut parsnips up to make them look like potatoes in the vain hope she’d be able to get me to eat more veg! I never fell for it - but would happily eat all the rest of the stew she’d make. She used left over Sunday roast beef cut into small pieces, add with potatoes, carrots, parsnips and stock cubes to make a really nice stew. Very occasionally she’d make dumplings. These I completely loved!

Chicken stew would also work in a slow cooker. You can imagine how nice the carrots, leeks, potatoes and chicken would all taste together.

Slow cooker recipes might not necessary appear to be a great low calorie food until you realise that you can control the amount of calories in them, put masses of vegetables in, and limit the amount of oil and fat used to brown the meat. Stews and other slow cooker meals are very traditionally winter dishes and ideal for those cold days when you might otherwise rush to the biscuit box whilst waiting for tea to be ready, but if you’re clever you can time tea to be ready as soon as you get home from work - eliminating any possible snack-danger points you might find!

Slow cooker recipes usually freeze well too, so can be used to put extra portions into the freezer so you can get maximum benefit from the time you spend choppig veggies. Some people think its better to chop things late the evening before you’re putting it on, but that’s entirely up to you. If you don’t have time to do it before rushing out to work then spending five minutes chopping in the evening might be the best idea.
Anything which is ultimately labour saving is good - getting great food for less effort is something I think everyone would like.

Need instructions for a slow cooker?

Crockpot manual - Crock-Pot® Stoneware Slow Cooker Owner’s Guide 38601. You can download this as a pdf also.

Sunbeam manual - this is a pdf file and has lots of recipes.

MSC60 Mistral/AWW 6litre Slow Cooker Instruction Manual - pdf file. Includes recipes from Australian Womens Weekly. Looks like the stainless steel slow cookers available in the UK.

BSC100 Black & Decker Slow Cooker Instruction Manual - pdf file again with recipes including fruity beef curry and chili con carne