Paulene Christie - Slow Cooker Central Family Favourites: 200 new classics the whole family will love

Contents

Contents

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First published in Australia in 2019 by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited ABN 36 009 913 517 harpercollins.com.au Copyright Paulene Christie 2019 The right of Paulene Christie to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000. This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Some recipes in this book were previously published in Slow Cooker Central, Slow Cooker Central 2, Slow Cooker Central: Super Savers and Slow Cooker Central: Kids. Family Favourites. Family Favourites.

It doesnt feel like that long ago that I was writing the introduction for our last book, or for the books before that, yet here we are at book five! What a wild ride its been first let me take you back on the journey that led us to this point... In 2012 I launched our Facebook group Slow Cooker Recipes 4 Families. I had hoped a few of my friends may join me in my interest in slow cooking and perhaps we could share some recipes and ideas. Little did I know that the group would grow to be a global hit with over half a million members from all over the world in just a few short years. We soon had to create the www.slowcookercentral.com website to adequately showcase and archive our thousands of recipes, our slow cooker blog articles and our many slow cooker reviews. In 2014 we were approached by the amazing team at ABC Books and HarperCollins Australia and asked to create and release a book to share the recipes of our community! In 2015 we released that first book in our series, Slow Cooker Central.

Soon followed by Slow Cooker Central 2 the following year in 2016. In 2017 our newest edition, Slow Cooker Central Super Savers took a budget focus, gathering recipes that ranged from $5 to $25 each to suit all budgets. 2018 saw the release of Slow Cooker Central Kids, recipes that all families, but especially the kids, would love to eat and could also help us to cook. All these books were a mix of my own recipes and those submitted by members of our community and every one of these books topped the Australian bestseller lists! With this latest addition we have taken a new turn. Slow Cooker Central Family Favourites is a collection of recipes purely from my own kitchen. Ive gathered a collection of 200 of my best recipes for you: 100 brand new and never-before seen recipes plus 100 of my most popular classics! Recipes Ive created for my family, that now your whole family can enjoy.

Recipes across all meal types, plus snacks, sweets and entertaining too! Recipes cooked in my home kitchen, tested on the tastebuds of my willing family and friends, and perfected until I had them just right for you. As always we stay true to our motto real food, cooked by real people, in real kitchens! There are no exhaustive lists of fancy exotic ingredients no one has ever heard of. No complex steps or skills that require years of training in the kitchen to master. No overly styled or Photoshopped glossy photos that no one can hope to recreate. Real food. Real results.

Food thats easy to prepare and delicious to eat! I hope you and your family enjoy this collection of my Family Favourites From my kitchen to yours Happy slow cooking everyone xx Paulene Christie

We have here what we hope is a great collection of tips and 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 it 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 only 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 amount of 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 to 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.

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