Paulene Christie - Ready, Set, Slow!: 160 all-new recipes from Australias slow-cooking queen

Contents

Dedicated to Simon, Caleb, Talyn & EllaTo the moon and back again my lovesxx Contents Ready Are you ready to start slow cooking but perhaps you dont know where to start? Well, the best place to start is our jam-packed Hints & Tips chapter that follows right after this introduction. It has everything you need to know about slow cooking and how to make the most out of your slow cooker. Maybe you are already a slow cooker fan who regularly visits our website www.slowcookercentral.com or our Facebook group Slow Cooker Recipes 4 Families, but now you are curious to get offline and explore our books. Perhaps you already own the previous five books in the Slow Cooker Central series (see second last page for the full list) and now you are ready and waiting excitedly for this new collection of recipes. Whichever description best fits you, we are ready for you! Set Set yourself up somewhere comfortable, then sit back and explore the tasty treats we have for you within these pages. This latest collection has over 160 brand-new, never-before-seen recipes of all varieties for you to try.

Covering all types of meals for every occasion; from classic recipes to intriguing international flavours; along with plenty of snacks, sweets and treats to please this book has the lot! Continuing our motto of real food, for real people in real kitchens, we pride ourselves on simple yet sensational recipes. No fancy exotic ingredients or difficult technical skills to master. No overly styled photos that the average home chef cant ever seem to reproduce. Real food. Real easy. Thats what we deliver! EVERYONE can have success with our recipes! Slow Life is so incredibly hectic so its important to slow down when you can.

These recipes help you do just that! They can be prepared when it suits you and they can be cooked at a time thats convenient for you, even without you being there whether that best time is all day, after work or even overnight! They will fill your house with beautiful aromas all day long. They will save you money. They will make you feel like a competent and successful superstar in the kitchen. But most importantly, they enable you to slow down during that hectic predinnertime chaos that takes over in so many homes each and every night. Let dinner take care of itself, so you can take care of something else. Or simply take that extra time to take care of YOU.

Slow cooking is what youve been looking for! Slow Cooker Central is your definitive guide to all things slow cooking! Slow Cooker Central: Ready Set Slow! is the solution to all your dinner dilemmas and kitchen chaos! So get ready, set, SLOW COOK! Happy slow cooking everyone. xx Paulene xx

Here, we have what we hope is a great collection of tips, tricks and frequently asked questions that we have gathered from the collective experience in our slow cooking community. Weve covered some really important safety dos and donts to help you to get the very best out of your slow cooking experiments while minimising the risks that other cooks may unknowingly take. The section on the tea-towel trick helps explain what that strategy is all about you will see this mentioned a lot in our recipes. It helps us make many of the unique and unusual dishes we create in our slow cookers. So BEFORE you start cooking, have a read through the hints and tips that follow and then your hardest decision after that will just be deciding which great recipe from the book to cook first.

Can I use frozen meat in the slow cooker? This is a hotly debated topic. The short answer is yes, you could, but no you should not! Many people will tell you they have done so for years and its never hurt them. However, thats probably more to do with luck than anything else. Dont follow dangerous advice. Its a risk that is quite frankly unnecessary, and we hope is one that you wont take with yourself or those being served your meals. Heres why...

Health concerns Although some people will state that they cook frozen meat in their slow cookers, the health and food technology experts say that, for food safety reasons, you should bring your food to temperatures of 60C (140F) or more as quickly as possible. Some people assume that cooking frozen meat in a slow cooker works the same way as with other methods, but they are not the same. Food cooked in the oven or on a stovetop heats up much faster than in a slow cooker. Cooking frozen meat in a slow cooker significantly increases the time it takes for food to reach the safe temperature target, and thus significantly increases the chances of you and your family getting food poisoning. Cooker care Cooking meat from frozen also increases the risk of a ceramic slow cooker bowl cracking as a result of the wide difference in temperature between the frozen food and the heating bowl. If the bowl cracks, your slow cooker is unusable.

On a similar note, you should always remove the food from your slow cooker dish before refrigerating it. The nature of the thick ceramic bowl means it retains heat and thus takes a lot longer to cool down to safe refrigeration temperatures, once again leaving your food too long in the danger zone. In Summary Please dont prioritise convenience over safety. It may be that you have to take the time to defrost your meat first, or you may in fact have to change the meal you had planned to cook for today until tomorrow when you can have the meat defrosted but its worth it. I for one will not take that risk with my loved ones. You are free to weigh up this risk for you and your family and hopefully make the safe decision for your home.

Cook smart cook safe. How can I thicken slow-cooker recipes with a high liquid content? Slow cooking can produce dishes with excess liquid due to condensation forming on the lid and the fact the lid stays closed so the liquid doesnt reduce as with some stovetop or oven methods. Heres a collection of tips and trick you can use to ensure a thickened consistency for your final dish. Cornflour (cornstarch) Mix 12 tablespoons of cornflour with 12 tablespoons of cool tap water and mix until it becomes a thin runny paste without any lumps (some people prefer to use rice flour or arrowroot flour). Pour this mix straight into your slow cooker dish 2030 minutes before serving and stir briefly around whatever is in the pot. Then leave the dish to continue cooking, preferably on HIGH but LOW if the recipe requires.

This added cornflour will thicken the liquids in the recipe. If this amount of cornflour doesnt thicken the liquids sufficiently, you can repeat the process. But take care not to add too much cornflour to your recipe one or two additions are usually all thats needed. Some people ladle the liquid out of the slow cooker into a saucepan on the stove and add the cornflour there. How you do it is totally up to you. Gravy granules/powder Substitute gravy granules for cornflour and follow the method described above.

The suitability of this option will depend on the recipe and whether the addition of gravy will suit it. Grated potato Grate 12 raw potatoes and add them to the slow cooker 3045 minutes before serving. Stir them as much as you can around the solid ingredients. This will very quickly thicken the dish and the remaining cooking time will allow the potato to cook through. Grated potato will only suit some recipes those with vegetable or potato already in them or which would be complemented by the addition of potato. You can use instant potato flakes in place of grated raw potato.

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