Diane Phillips - The Mediterranean Slow Cooker Cookbook

The Mediterranean region produces some of the most varied cuisines on the planetfrom Mlaga, Spain, to Istanbul, Turkey, to Tunis, Tunisia. And many of the foods from this part of the world rely on a slow-cooked method to bring out the flavors of the ingredients and produce meltingly tender dishes.

Slow cooking has been around for thousands of years. One of the earliest slow cookers was a cauldronlike pot used by Cro-Magnon men and women in southwestern France. In modern times, enameled cast-iron Dutch ovens have been used for braising, hammered-steel and copper stockpots for making soups, and conical tagines for making stews. Todays modern and sleek new electric slow cookers are great for making all sorts of dishes, and they do their job off the stove top. A slow-cooked meal has been a comfort food for the ages, satisfying and soothing the soul.

The Portuguese, with their love of the sea and its bounty, prepare seafood in myriad ways; for example, they slow-cook whole fish or fillets on the stove top with potatoes and saffron, and they make enormous pots of seafood stew. Spaniards are famous for their paella, flavored with saffron, pork products, and salt cod. Moving along the northern Mediterranean coastline, we reach France, with its slow-cooked beef stews in red wine, and its famous seafood stew, bouillabaisse. Italian slow-cooked foods range from minestrone, a thick vegetable soup, to porchetta, a stuffed rolled pork shoulder cooked for hours until it falls apart in juicy, tender, rosemary-scented chunks. Greece and Turkey present a variety of slow-cooked foods, from lamb flavored with lemon and rosemary to eggplant dishes. Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, and the entire North African Mediterranean coast boast aromatic and flavorful cuisines, often with ancient roots. A palate of herbs and spices defines their culinary cultures. The slow-cooked dishes of the Mediterranean, served from home and restaurant kitchens, are truly as varied as the regions terrain.

An electric slow cooker in your kitchen can bring the Mediterranean into your home. When you want to make something different and special to serve to family and friends, this book will be your go-to source for great recipes. They reflect a more sophisticated approach to the slow cooker, requiring a few more ingredients, and maybe a few new flavor combinations for you to enjoy, instead of the meat and potatoes you might dump in your machine before running off to work.

Why use the slow cooker? Im asked this question time and again, and the answer is quite simple. I dont have to baby it along on the stove top or in the oven. I can literally set it and forget it until it is done. With a programmable slow cooker, the food is automatically switched to the warm setting after cooking for the allotted amount of time. I can leave the house, go about my business, and return to a perfectly cooked dinnerno worries about overcooked or burned dishes. Another great benefit of using the slow cooker is that unlike the heat on a stove top or in an oven, the heat in a slow cooker is constant, so all the ingredients cook at the same temperature. Slow cookers are energy efficient, too, using only as much electricity as a 75-watt lightbulb.

Included here are tagines; tender lamb cooked in a variety of ways; classics like , and sauces to complement the main dishes.

When you use a slow cooker as your low and slow oven, an elegant dinner for friends can be a reality any night of the week. Or you can cook up a delicious Sunday supper for your family using any of these mouthwatering recipes. Youll learn streamlined techniques for getting these scrumptious dishes to the table, full of fresh flavors. And as we travel around the Mediterranean, sampling its varied and bountiful foods, Ill also include a bit of history.

Each country possesses a rich bounty of delicious ingredients for the Mediterranean table: aromatic spices and glistening fresh seafood in the markets of Marrakech, pungent sheeps and goats milk cheeses on rural Greek farms, truffles in the Dordogne region of France, spring lambs on the salt marshes of France, wild boar in Tuscany, fields of wild oregano in Sicily, and vineyards heavy with grapes throughout the region. Lying roughly between the thirtieth and fortieth parallels of latitude, the Mediterranean enjoys a climate that is generally mild, giving crops in most of the region a long growing season.