Notes about Recipes in this book

• Red wine-braised short ribs

  • hiraeth27 on November 29, 2018

    I don't know why they call this red wine-braised...almost all of the liquid is from tomatoes. It calls for half a cup wine and four cans of tomatoes. That's a 1 to 7 ratio. In the end, it just tasted like beef cooked in canned tomatoes. In a slow cooker, the tomatoes don't even cook down enough to concentrate the flavors and avoid wateriness. After ten hours of slow cooking, I dumped this into a stovetop pan, added another half a bottle of wine and reduced it down to just under the original volume. Much better.

• New Mexican red pork chili

  • TrishaCP on February 09, 2019

    This was tasty. It is a slow cooker recipe that requires some of your time beforehand (sautéing veg, etc), but then cooks long enough (9-10 hours) that you can make it on a day you are at work. (I just prepped the night before.) There is no degreasing step, but we found it was needed.

  • ashallen on October 29, 2019

    I really, really like this recipe - very flavorful!! Pork also gets really nicely tender. I use a bit more onion than called for in the recipe (2-3 cups). I prefer the raisins to be well cooked and for their sweetness to permeate the sauce so I chop them up well and stir them in half-way through cooking instead of adding them whole at the end. Like TrishaCP, I've found that a degreasing step can be helpful - whether or not I need to degrease seems to depend on how much care I take to trim fat from the pork before placing it in the slow cooker. [Cross-post for Slow Cooker Revolution/Complete Slow Cooker.]

• Thai chicken with coconut curry sauce

  • SenseiHeidi on September 18, 2019

    Yummy! Use at least 2 Tbsp green curry paste. I used regular sweetened flake coconut. Check the chicken temp after 45 minutes.

• Smothered pork chops with apples

  • SenseiHeidi on September 02, 2021

    Used 4lb butt roast, upped s&p to 1tsp each. Microwaved the onions with 1/2 s&p for 2 minutes, dumped all in pot, onions on bottom. Did not use the flour or vinegar. Also did not bother to saute. 2tbsp cornstarch slurry at end. 4 hours on High was plenty. Served with mashed potatoes with peas and corn.

• Applesauce spice cake

  • adewar on May 10, 2020

    This cake was tender and well risen - no hard crust, and it was brown and looked appetizing. My family thought it tasted more like banana cake than apple -possibly because of the spices. A good plain cake for everyday.

• Brazilian black bean and pork stew

  • JessicaRFisher on September 27, 2020

    This is a favourite in our house. It makes loads and freezes well. I have a spicy mango relish that is delicious with it.

  • JessicaRFisher on April 01, 2021

    This is a firm family favourite in our house. It makes a huge quantity and freezes well.

• Classic pot roast with carrots and potatoes

  • WasagaGirl on November 11, 2018

    I liked this one....I didn't think there would be enough liquid but there was more than enough. Wrapping the roast in tinfoil seemed to really improve the texture.

• Cuban pork roast with mojo sauce

  • ashallen on February 24, 2022

    I liked the texture of the pork in this recipe - very tender with good, though not intense, flavors from the cooking juices. My pork roast was interlaced with a lot of fat so it wasn't great for slicing, but even if it had been, the meat was so tender after 6 hours on "high" that I'm not sure it would have worked out! The flavor of the sauce, however, was disappointingly flat. I did sizzle the garlic in a bit of the oil for 30 seconds and, after accidentally putting all of my fresh orange juice in the slow cooker, had to substitute a (very nice) boxed orange juice for the sauce - maybe those changes affected it. I messed around with the sauce a bit but ultimately would have preferred to have eaten the pork with just the defatted cooking juices.

• Barbecued beef brisket

  • ashallen on April 19, 2022

    This was great, particularly for a slow cooker recipe. I used a piece of brisket that was 1 pound smaller than called for in the recipe - worked fine. Very tender. As usual for slow-cooked brisket, it sliced more cleanly after resting overnight. Recipe makes lots of flavorful sauce. At first it seemed like it might be spicier than we prefer, even though I'd cut back on the chipotle by 1 tbsp, but a lot of heat disappeared with the fat skimmed from the sauce's surface at the end of cooking. I skipped the liquid smoke but it would have been a nice addition.

• Asian-style braised short ribs

  • ashallen on June 18, 2021

    This recipe has an excellent effort-to-flavor ratio. Super easy with minimal prep. Ribs were perfectly tender and sauce was great straight from the slow cooker - no need for further reduction. Flavor was very good even with my not-so-great hoisin sauce. Flavors mellowed a lot during the long cooking so the final sauce tasted like slightly sweet beef gravy. I halved the chili-garlic sauce and that was a good level of heat for us. When I first set everything up for cooking, I wondered if the amount of liquid called for would be enough, but the ribs exuded enough fat/liquid during cooking that it wasn't an issue. Recipe says it yields 2 servings, but we were happy eating this over ~4 meals. If you have time to refrigerate before eating, the rendered fat solidifies on top of the sauce, making it very easy to peel away, and the meat develops a silkier texture.

• Classic beef chili

  • ashallen on November 21, 2021

    The flavors in this chili were fine but washed-out in comparison to those in my usual stovetop ground beef-and-bean chili. Not very spicy even though my chipotles were extra-hot and I kept their seeds. Adding some vinegary hot sauce after the cooking is done helps to brighten this up. I substituted black beans for kidney beans and they stayed intact for the long cook. I like the convenience of putting everything in the slow cooker and walking away, but given the flavor differences I'll continue to use my stovetop recipe.

• Golden Northern cornbread

  • ashallen on November 13, 2020

    We really like this cornbread recipe and have made it many times. I especially love the texture which is high, light (but still substantial), a bit springy, and moist. Not too sweet and good corn flavor. Be careful not to overbake - it dries out. It's definitely best the day it's made, but keeps okay for a day or so. Recipe calls for stone-ground cornmeal but a coarse grind yielded a gritty cornbread - we like a medium or fine grind best. Also works well when doubled and baked in a 9x13-inch pan. [Cross-post for Cook's Ill. Magazine/Cook's Ill. 1995 Annual Edition/ Cook's Ill. Cookbook/ The Complete Slow Cooker/ A Bread a Day blog]

• Hearty beef stew

  • ashallen on November 16, 2020

    Very good stew - given the basic nature of the recipe, I was actually surprised that I liked it as much as I did! Both the meat and the vegetables come out very nicely tender. Not as sumptuously flavored as one of Julia Child's beef stew recipes, but like TrishaCP, I love that it skips the messy meat-browning step. Easy to pull together overall - trimming the meat of excess fat/membrane was the most fiddly part. Freezes well. [Cross-post Slow Cooker Revolution/Complete Slow Cooker]

• Thai chicken and coconut soup

  • ashallen on August 25, 2019

    Good soup. Last weekend I made a quick-cooked version which I prefer to this slow-cooked version - overall the quick-cooked version's flavors seemed fresher and more nuanced (despite the very good approach in this slow-cooked recipe of adding many of the aromatics at the very end). But this recipe has a couple of attributes some might like - (1) the chicken has classic slow cooker flavor/texture, and (2) fat rises to the surface during cooking and can be skimmed or left in the soup as desired. My coconut milk had only guar gum as an additive - the can I added at the beginning of cooking broke. (The can added at the end of the cooking process didn't break.) There was enough unemulsified chicken + coconut fat to make the final soup seem greasy - next time I'll skim off more. Freezes OK with some loss of the more aromatic flavors.

• Game day brats and beer

  • JTelcontar on December 03, 2020

    Did not strain the cooking juice as suggested. It's delicious and helps make the bun a bit juicy (recommend a sturdier bun-- we used pretzel buns). Will be using the leftovers over mashed potatoes!

• Shredded beef tacos with cabbage-carrot slaw

  • D.Barker on October 13, 2021

    This was pretty good! I loved the flavor of the meat, though the slaw wasn't that exciting to me.

• Japanese pork and ramen soup

  • D.Barker on November 14, 2021

    His was really easy, and pretty tasty, but it made a ton of soup, so be ready for leftovers. And the ramen didn't hold up super well after reheating. But we all really enjoyed this on the first day!