America’s Test Kitchen - Slow cooker revolution. Volume 2 : the easy prep edition

I grew up, at least in part, on a Vermont farm and was used to a kitchen that had no appliances to speak of, just a wood-burning Kalamazoo cast-iron stove, a hand pump for water in the sink, and a lot of elbow grease.

Since that time, however, many time-saving appliances have appeared, including the food processor, stand mixer, microwave, pressure cooker, toaster oven, and slow cooker. Of those devices, it is only the slow and pressure cookers that offer a whole new way of preparing finished dishesthe others are there to help prep food, not cook it through.

At first, the slow cooker was nothing more than plug-in convenience; dinner cooks while you are at work or out in the fields. When we published Slow Cooker Revolution three years ago, we decided to take a fresh look at this appliance, to use slow cooking as an advantage, not a restriction. To date, we have sold over 300,000 copies.

To do a second book (like Spider-Man 2) is risky business. One is apt to produce something half as good and twice as long! But we had a very clear goal in mind with this second volumewe wanted easier preparation (many of the recipes in the first book required front-end sauting, browning, and flavor development), and we also wanted to explore new territory, including complete pasta dinners, creamy dips, usually quick-cooking seafood recipes, and desserts such as cheesecake, brownies, and even crme brle.

Lets start at the beginning. This book includes 200 all-new recipes; there are no repeats from our first volume. All of the recipes in this second volume require no more than 15 minutes of active prep time before everything goes into the slow cooker. We also redefined the slow-cooker time-line. Some recipes are done in an hour or two, and others in 3 to 4 hours. You dont have to wait all day for dinner anymore.

Every year, around April, my neighbors Tom and Nancy and I have a game dinner, usually based on rabbits that ended up in the freezer during the hunting season. One year, we had a dozen or so rabbits that ended up in an all-day slow cooker along with a tomato-based spaghetti sauce. The results were quite good but not ideal since the meat turned out a bit dry. The point is simplethe slow cooker can be an instrument of good cooking or bad; one simply has to pay attention to its strengths and weaknesses.

That, of course, is what we do in our test kitchenfind the good ideas and eliminate the bad ones. Through this process we find that, sometimes, cutting corners works out just fine and other times it doesnt. That reminds me of the story of the Vermont sexton who had held onto his job as the town grave-digger, although he was not known as a model of industry. One day, the head of the cemetery association decided to have a talk with the man and said, Jeb, I dont like to mention this but it seems that every new grave you dig is a bit shallower than the one before. Jeb replied, Well, you havent seen anyone climb out of one yet, have you?