Robin Robertson - The Plant-Based Slow Cooker: 225 Super-Tasty Vegan Recipes--Easy, Delicious, Healthy Recipes for Every Meal of the Day!

Other books by Robin Robertson

Vegan Mac & Cheese

Veganize It!

Vegan Without Borders

Cook the Pantry

One-Dish Vegan

1,000 Vegan Recipes

Vegan Planet

Vegan on the Cheap

Party Vegan

More Quick-Fix Vegan

Quick-Fix Vegan

The Vegetarian Meat and Potatoes Cookbook

The Nut Butter Cookbook

Plant Protein Revolution

SUPER-TASTY VEGAN RECIPES

ROBIN ROBERTSON

For the animals

Many thanks to Eve-Marie Williams, recipe tester superstar, for testing all the new recipes in this editionyour slow cooker was working overtime!

I also remain grateful to those who slow-cooked their way through the recipes in the previous edition of this book: Amanda Sacco, Andrea Zeichner, Barbara Bryan, Dave Melmer, Debbie Cowherd, Heather Galaxy, Jill Paschal, Joan Farkas, Jocelyn Kimmel, Jonathan and Nancy Shanes, Julie Smallwood, Lea Jacobson, Lori Maffei, Lyndsay Orwig, Melissa Chapman, Melissa West, Sabrina Butkera, Terri Merritts, and Zsu Dever. Your careful and enthusiastic testing and spot-on feedback made my job much easier.

Much gratitude goes to everyone at Quarto and The Harvard Common Press for their part in making this book a reality, with special thanks to Erik Gilg, Associate Publisher; Dan Rosenberg, Editorial Director; Nyle Vialet, Project Manager; and Marissa Giambrone, Art Director.

Thanks also to my longtime agent, Stacey Glick of Dystel, Goderich & Bourret and to my husband, Jon Robertson, for always being there.

T he irresistible appeal of a slow cooker is its convenience and simplicity. Turn it on, and it cooks dinner while you do other things. You have no pot to watch. It doesnt burn or spill over. Just set it and let it do its work. Next thing you know, your kitchen smells heavenly, and you feel like your personal chef did all the work.

Slow cookers first appeared in the 1970s, and you could get one in harvest gold, avocado green, or maybe decorated with orange flowers. Back then, the Crock-Pot (as the Rival Company, which is now a brand of Sunbeam Products, trademarked it) was mostly favored for cooking tough cuts of meat. The Crock-Pot left the limelight for a while, but in 2002, when I wrote my first slow cooker cookbook (Fresh from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker, The Harvard Common Press, 2004), slow cookers were enjoying a comeback. The goal of my first slow cooker book was to show how versatile slow cookers are for vegetarian cooking they can be used to prepare everything from breakfast to dessert.

Fast-forward to 2012, ten years from writing that first book, and the popularity of slow cookers showed no sign of waning. Since those first two slow cooker cookbooks were published, Ive written many other titles, but I never stopped developing new recipes, discovering new techniques, and exploring new ideas for using the slow cooker. As Ive continued to develop new plant-based recipes for the slow cooker, and tweak my existing ones, Ive come to realize that it was time to share them in a new volume.

In the eight years since Fresh from the Vegan Slow Cooker (The Harvard Common Press, 2012) was published, I have developed new recipes and explored the worlds cuisines to discover more creative ways to prepare food using the slow cooker method. At the same time, more people are enjoying a plant-based diet than ever before, and they may be looking for a new take on a reliable cooking method.

Im pleased and proud, therefore, to present this new book to you. It contains more than 225 recipes using only plant-based ingredients. While Ive included much of the general information and the basic recipes from the first two books, this new volume contains many new recipes and lots of updated tips for making the most of your slow cooker experience. Ive worked hard to make the recipes accessible using most sizes of slow cookers. In addition to being plant based, the recipes have helpful icons to indicate if they are also gluten-free, soy-free, or fat-free, or have options to make them so. Ive also added a new chapter called Not from the Crock that contains recipes for ingredients used to enhance some of the slow cooker recipes that are not themselves made in a slow cooker, such as cashew sour cream and tempeh bacon.

We all know that a slow cooker is ideal for cooking beans, soups, and stews, but as you explore the pages of The Plant-Based Slow Cooker, youll discover a whole new slow-cooking world. The slow cooker can be used to make braised vegetable dishes, comforting casseroles, luxurious risottos, and fun dips and snacks. It can even be used to bake potatoes, breads, pts, and desserts.

With chapters on everything from appetizers to main dishes, desserts, and beverages, theres something for everyones breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The Plant-Based Slow Cooker picks up where my previous books left off and delivers healthy and delicious plant-based recipes. I love to cook in my slow cooker, and I hope that after you try some of these recipes, you will, too.

T here is something almost primal about slow cooking that warms the soul. Perhaps this feeling is rooted in our ancestral iron-pot traditions around the hearth. Cooking food in closed ceramic vessels dates back at least to Roman times and is still done throughout the world, from the Moroccan tagine and the Italian fagioliera to the Pan-Asian clay pots (in Chinese, shguo or bozai; in Japanese, donabe). There is growing interest in another, even lower-tech method called retained heat or haybox cooking, in which food is brought to a boil and then allowed to continue cooking inside an insulated container.

The first modern electric slow cooker was originally developed for bean cooking. The Beanery, made by Naxon Utilities Corporation, was redubbed the Crock-Pot by the Rival Manufacturing Company after it bought Naxon in 1971. This revolutionary kitchen appliance was marketed to working women as a way to make a home-cooked meal while they were at work, and they quickly put it to use in preparing pot roasts and other meat-centric dishes. A phenomenal hit at the time, the Crock-Pot fad faded, only to enjoy a resurgence some thirty years later. Since those early days, more than 80 million slow cookers have been sold, with more than 350 models and counting, from basic manual cookers limited to the two Low or High settings to fully programmable units with a variety of settings.

If you have been using a slow cooker in your kitchen with any regularity, then you know that there are many answers to that question.

For many years, I used my 1970s-era slow cooker for cooking beans or bean soups. However, when I got my first high-tech slow cooker, I was inspired to look beyond bean basics and began experimenting with all of the ingredients I love. To my delight, I discovered that the slow cooker cooked a seitan pot roast just as well as it had cooked traditional roasts, and it easily cooked many of my other favorite vegan dishes.