Good Food - Good Food: Ultimate Slow Cooker Recipes

Slow cooker recipes are an essential for any home cook time saving, low cost and reliably delicious. The Good Food kitchen has produced hundreds of brilliant recipes over the years, and this collection gathers 150 of the very best.

Slow cookers allow anyone to create mouth-watering dishes that can be cooked overnight or while youre at work so that you can enjoy your meal as soon as you get home. From family favourites like curries, chillis, soups and puddings, to fresh ideas for stews, fish and tasty vegetarian meals, Good Food Ultimate Slow Cooker Recipes has something for everyone.

All recipes are short and simple with easy-to-follow steps, and are accompanied by a full-colour photograph of the finished dish.

Sara Buenfeld is a food writer and journalist. She has written and edited many Good Food titles, including the Eat Well: 14 Day Healthy Eating Diet, and works freelance for several food publications.

Whether you are out all day and want to come home to a hot home-cooked meal, or you like to effortlessly entertain, using a slow cooker is a fantastic and energy-saving way to cook.

Slow cookers are increasing in popularity and we know that from the success of our previous slow cooker books, and the many requests we receive for recipes and advice.

Here we have brought together a collection of fabulous recipes from two previous best-selling books as well as new Good Food recipes that we have adapted and tested, to show you how versatile a slow cooker can be. It can also be an asset in the kitchen to help you part-cook conventional recipes like pies and cobblers or pasta dishes and pulled pork.

We have included family recipes like chilli con carne, chicken casserole and cottage pie, but also authentic curries and exotic dishes that you can enjoy with friends when you can spend a little more time in the kitchen. There are also preserves, gently cooked fish dishes, impressive desserts even a Christmas pudding so that you dont have to worry about it steaming on the hob any more.

To get the best flavours from the ingredients, we found that it is better for many recipes to pre-fry meat and onions rather than put them in raw, but if you would rather get the recipe ready the night before, just cook from cold and add 1-2 hours to our cooking time to build in the heating process. Check manufacturers instructions for advice too.

Many people who love to cook, love their slow cookers for the unique way that they cook, so plug in yours and see what you can do. We think you will be pleasantly surprised.

Getting the best from your slow cooker

Every slow cooker is different, so make sure you keep your manufacturers manual handy when using it. However, here well share with you the Good Food teams top tips for slow cooking.

Lots of the recipes can be changed to fit in with your lifestyle, so follow your manuals guidelines on decreasing or increasing cooking times by changing the temperature of the slow cooker. However, weve found rice and pasta dishes really work best when cooked on High for the shortest time possible.

Always use easy-cook rice, if you can get it, and dont forget to rinse the rice well first. The more starch you can wash off the rice, the better the finished dish.

Slow cookers vary considerably in size, so weve written a variety of recipes, for a variety of portions. Many of these are easily halved or doubled check the individual recipes for recommendations.

If the sauce of a stew or a casserole is a little thin for your liking, mix 1 tablespoon cornflour to a paste with a splash of the sauce, then transfer to a pan with a ladleful of the sauce and bring to the boil to thicken. Stir back into the stew and repeat if need be.

If you want to adapt your own recipes to suit a slow cooker, look for something similar in this book and copy the timings but reduce the liquid in your original recipe by around a third.

Sara Buenfeld

Eggs are large in the UK and Australia and extra large in America unless stated.

Wash fresh produce before preparation.

Recipes contain nutritional analyses for sugar, which means the total sugar content including all natural sugars in the ingredients, unless otherwise stated.

All the recipes in this book list both metric and imperial measurements. Conversions are approximate and have been rounded up or down. Follow one set of measurements only; do not mix the two.

Cup measurements, which are used in Australia and America, have not been listed here as they vary from ingredient to ingredient. Kitchen scales should be used to measure dry/solid ingredients.

Spoon measurements are level unless otherwise specified.

1 teaspoon (tsp) = 5ml

1 tablespoon (tbsp) = 15ml

1 Australian tablespoon = 20ml

(cooks in Australia should measure 3 teaspoons where 1 tablespoon is specified in a recipe)

Good Food is concerned about sustainable sourcing and animal welfare. Where possible, humanely reared meats, sustainably caught fish (see fishonline.org for further information from the Marine Conservation Society) and free-range chickens and eggs are used when recipes are originally tested.