Once again Other Mother has taken over. I have to say this was a wonderful week of food. She cooked and we ate and ate and ate. The coconut rice pudding was to DIE for. Please go visit the Other Mother at Rants & Raves! She is looking for friends!
You all know how I love to cook. I cook almost everything from scratch. Not only is it usually much cheaper, but you get better food and you know what is in it. Growing up in my family a good meal was another way to say" I love you enough to go to all this effort to make sure you are well cared for". The two things I don't like about cooking are the dishes after and the heat. I bake all winter long but when the weather warms up, I would rather chew on my shoe than heat up my house with the stove.
Lucky for 
me my dear friend Lynette @ Crazed Mind thought about how much I enjoy cooking and shared a wonderful cookbook with me! Yay! Slow Cooker plus Casseroles, Soups and Stews was her gift to me! It is put out by Hearst Magazines and is reasonably priced at $9.99. Now I can do more in the crock pot and less on the stove. As it turns out, she could not have given me this at a better time. It has been in the upper 80's for over a week and College Girl had tech weekend this weekend and has a play that runs all week long so she can not get home for dinner. I have been cooking up a storm to send food with her and still I am able to keep my home cool! We have cooked several recipes out of this cookbook and so far everyone has loved them all. Just to be fair we wrote down page numbers and pulled them out of a hat to decide what to make. We ended up cooking beef stew, coq au vin, roasted bell pepper cheese straws, Italian wedding pasta, coconut rice pudding and a great country loaf bread. All were fantastic and the only complaint I had was the cheese straws were a lot of work since I even roasted the peppers and by the time the second tray was done...the first one was GONE! Oh they were so good! I have done my baking in the evening when its cooler and used my crock pot during the day. For us, we had enough food to send to College Girl, eat dinner and have leftovers for lunch the next day. What a blessing from my dear friend. Naturally I thanked her with food :)
me my dear friend Lynette @ Crazed Mind thought about how much I enjoy cooking and shared a wonderful cookbook with me! Yay! Slow Cooker plus Casseroles, Soups and Stews was her gift to me! It is put out by Hearst Magazines and is reasonably priced at $9.99. Now I can do more in the crock pot and less on the stove. As it turns out, she could not have given me this at a better time. It has been in the upper 80's for over a week and College Girl had tech weekend this weekend and has a play that runs all week long so she can not get home for dinner. I have been cooking up a storm to send food with her and still I am able to keep my home cool! We have cooked several recipes out of this cookbook and so far everyone has loved them all. Just to be fair we wrote down page numbers and pulled them out of a hat to decide what to make. We ended up cooking beef stew, coq au vin, roasted bell pepper cheese straws, Italian wedding pasta, coconut rice pudding and a great country loaf bread. All were fantastic and the only complaint I had was the cheese straws were a lot of work since I even roasted the peppers and by the time the second tray was done...the first one was GONE! Oh they were so good! I have done my baking in the evening when its cooler and used my crock pot during the day. For us, we had enough food to send to College Girl, eat dinner and have leftovers for lunch the next day. What a blessing from my dear friend. Naturally I thanked her with food :)Just to let you know, this is a review and I recieved no compensation for this. Lynette recieved a copy of this for review purposes which she kindly shared. My opinions are my own and the food was fantastic!
I love cooking in my Slow Cookers.. They are the handiest thing to have.. I have 3 Crock Pots.. and 2 Enesco Roasters.. I have to admit the Roasters get used more then the Crock Pots..
ReplyDeleteI love that it doesn't dirty a lot of dishes to cook in them.. One Pot cooking is my kind of cooking!!!
Upper 80's?? Can I come over?? It has been 40 or below for weeks now, and nothing but wet! Rain all day every day. Miserable.
ReplyDeleteI have only recently learned to love cooking and I mostly hate the time it takes-like prepping food, cleaning as you go, picking up the food you've dropped (that's not just me right??), stalling the teenager to wait for dinner, etc etc, and then having to finish washing the dishes at the end. It's such a time-consuming thing to cook from scratch.
HOWEVER - my son is much happier on the weeks that I cook every day. And he comes home for lunch to eat our leftovers, which he is loving.
I can't really tell if it saves money, I need to figure this out. Everyone says it does so it must right? This year it will thanks to my plan to have a kickass garden and can't wait to just walk outside and pick fresh organic foods for our meals!!