South - Slow cooked : 200 exciting, new recipes for your slow cooker

This is no-fuss, slow-cooker food at its best.

Miss South is an exciting new voice for food writing with a passion for cooking good food on a tight budget. Inspired by her beloved slow cooker, here she shares over 200 recipes for delicious and frugal slow-cooked dishes.

Try Miss Souths easy Yoghurt and Granola, mouth-watering Beef Rendang and Red Velvet Pudding, simple White Bread with tangy Lemon Curd and her addictive Cream Cheese Brownies all slow cooked and easy to make. Find an original, foolproof recipe for every occasion, plus lots of inventive ideas to use up any leftovers.

Miss South is an exciting new voice for food writing with a passion for cooking good food on a very tight budget. The London-based food blogger won the Young British Foodies Food Writing award in September 2013 for her blog North/South Food, which she writes with her brother Mister North. Miss South has also written for Observer Food Monthly as well as appearing on The Food Programme on Radio 4.

I was delighted to write this book. I have always loved slow-simmered stews, hearty soups and puddings, but found it hard to justify cooking them from scratch for one person, especially when I factored in rising energy prices and the commitment of time they took to keep an eye on the oven or baste things. If only there was a way I could have more delicious food in my life and less hard work. The answer arrived on my birthday in the shape of a slow cooker.

The simplicity of a slow cooker was the perfect addition to my home kitchen. Id been cooking for the last twelve or so years as well as blogging at North/South Food along with my brother, Mister North, and I felt ready for a new challenge.

I opened the booklet that came with the slow cooker and got going. My kitchen smelled wonderful and there was something truly comforting about home-cooked food bubbling away in the corner while I got on with life. The food was nice. But nothing more than that. It filled me up and I loved the ability to batch cook something with ease, but none of the dishes wowed me yet.

Never one to do things by halves, I did some slow-cooker research and something leapt out at me: most people using slow cookers concentrated on the first part of the name and less on the second; many of the recipes seemed to be just heating ingredients up very slowly, rather than cooking them to create something delicious.

I thought about how the slow cooker actually works: the metal outer casing of the slow cooker contains a heating element that conducts heat through a ceramic or glass crock, trapping the warmth in with a lid. Unlike the dry heat of an oven or open heat source, the lid forms a seal around the food, using the steam created in cooking to form a vacuum. This moist environment cooks the food with heat from below and above simultaneously, combining braising, baking or poaching with steaming all at the same time. The moisture in the food and the added liquid of a recipe cant evaporate because of the tight seal on the lid. Food is more watery and the flavourings diluted by this extra liquid and this can result in the blandness that many people complain about in meals cooked in a slow cooker. Instead of fighting against the slow cookers style, I needed to work with it.