My Favorite Kitchen Gadgets (and how I use them to make my life easier): The Crockpot Edition

I like to tease my husband that the local Best Buy^® store is his best friend. He likes to spend time there visiting his favorite gadgets and daydreaming about bringing them home one day. Since I do most of the meal prep and cooking in the house, I thought I would introduce you to my best kitchen friends (i.e. gadgets that make my life easier): Mr. Food Processor, Mrs. Blender and Ms. Crockpot.

Of course I can’t live without my favorite Santoku knife for chopping, or my vegetable peeler, or my salad spinner, or any other number of smaller gadgets that I use on a daily basis, but I’m going to focus on my top 3 favorites.

Let me now take this opportunity to make a plug for the revival of the crockpot. Most people I ask say they have a crockpot stored away somewhere, or they don’t have one but their mother does. I get strange looks when I tell them I use my crockpot on a weekly (sometimes daily) basis. The biggest response I get is that they would use it more if they had good recipes. I have to say, nothing is easier than using a crockpot, and you can make very healthy recipes easily in it.

For example, HMR entrees mixed with vegetables are easy in the crockpot. I call these “dump dump” recipes (I’m sure someone can suggest a better term for this). Open an HMR Entrée (or two) and dump the contents into your crockpot. Open a few cans of your favorite vegetables, drain and rinse them, and dump them into your crockpot. Put on low and check after 2-3 hours. The HMR Vegetable Stew with Beef and the HMR Turkey Chili are ideal candidates for the crockpot as stews and chilis are traditionally what people have used their crockpots to make.

Here are links to some of my favorite crockpot recipes.

Baked potatoes in the crockpot. Love baked potatoes but hate to turn the oven on? Use the crockpot! I love HMR Turkey Chili over baked potatoes:

baked potato crockpot recipe

Ratatouille in the crockpot is one of my favorite vegetable recipes. It provides lots of volume and servings, with very little effort. I like this recipe (I omit the oil) and mix it with an HMR Mushroom Risotto. I’ve also pureed it for the kids and poured it over some pasta as a sauce and they loved it:

ratatouille crockpot recipe

Minestrone soup in the crockpot is a good way to increase your vegetable servings. You could omit the pasta and add the HMR Pasta Fagioli or try the HMR Chicken Pasta Parmesan:

minestrone soup crockpot recipe

I love this marinara sauce. Seriously, it is the only way I make marinara sauce anymore. You must try this! I go easy on the red pepper flakes since I serve it to the kids. I mix some of this with the HMR Pasta Fagioli and put both over a cooked sweet potato, and I also add this as extra sauce to the HMR Lasagna with Meat Sauce, and the HMR Cheese and Basil Ravioli:

marinara sauce crockpot recipe

As the Fall approaches, I love to go apple picking with our family, and make homemade unsweetened applesauce in the crockpot. The house smells wonderful and it feels like such a treat to eat hot applesauce freshly made, and I like to use it as a substitute for oil in some of my baking for the family. I omit the sugar in this recipe and use my immersion blender to give it more of a puree texture:

applesauce crockpot recipe

The crockpot is great for any season, it doesn’t heat your whole house the way turning on the oven does, and very little time is needed to stir and monitor your meal—you just dump in your ingredients and walk away (maybe get in a little extra PA while you’re at it?). It is a great solution for busy people with busy lives.

What about you? Do you use your crockpot regularly? Any favorite recipes to share?
 

by PeggyKerans on 10/10/2011 | Share Story With a Friend

tags: Weight-Loss, HMR, Recipes, Diet Tools, motivation, in the box, planning, mood, strategies, mommy blog