The Everything Slow Cooker Cookbook

This week I decided to make something from The Everything Slow Cooker Cookbook since it was kind of a hectic week with the last day of photo class. (By the way, thanks for the feedback on my photos!)

What should have been an easy dump-it-in-and-forget-it-experience went awry when on Wednesday morning I pulled out the roast I had just bought on Tuesday afternoon only to discover that it had turned rancid. N smelled it himself and confirmed it so it wasn’t just my wacky pregnant sense of smell. By the time I bought a new roast and returned the bad one to the store it was already after 2pm. And it was supposed to cook for at least 8 hours.

Add to that E had been in rare form all day due to teething and I was ready to call it a day. So I stubbornly popped the roast in at 2:30 pm and informed N that I thought we should order pizza for dinner after E went to bed and that we’d have the beef the following night. So last night after I got home from class we had the sandwiches which were pretty good (if a little heavy on the liquid smoke.) And E LOVED the meat and ate a whole bowl of it for dinner which is awesome.

Texas Barbecued Beef Sandwiches

Ingredients

• 4-pound chuck roast
• 1/2 cup water
• 2 cups ketchup
• 10 oz cola
• 1/4 cup Worcestershire sauce
• 2 T prepared mustard
• 1 T liquid smoke
• 1/4 cup Tabasco or other hot pepper sauce

Instructions

1. Cover and cook the roast with the water in the slow cooker on high setting for 8 hours, or until tender
2. Remove the roast. Shred the meat, trimming off the fat and discarding it in the process. Place the shredded meat in the slow cooker along with ketchup, cola, Worcestershire sauce. Mustard, liquid smoke, and hot sauce. Cook covered on high setting for 1 hour. Ladle over buns to serve.

The Verdict
3 (out of 5 stars). If you’re looking for a book containing the slow cooker dishes you remember your mom making when you were a kid this will do nicely. It covers main dishes, appetizers, soups, etc… More puzzlingly it also includes a chapter on bread(apparently you bake it inside a #2 coffee can inside the cooker). Recipes heavily rely on pre-prepared ingredients such as ketchup and canned goods but for me part of the joy of slow cooking is just being able to dump everything in. However, it seemed like many of the recipes are variations of the same.

It seems like many of the recipes aren’t that great, health-wise (high in sodium and fat) but nutritional info isn’t included. Photos are also missing but that probably helped keep the list price down. If you don’t have a slow cooker cookbook you can probably find most of the usable recipes at allrecipes.com or someplace else online.