If your family is anything like mine, you’re busy, you’re stressed, and your budget is a little on the short side right now. (This isn’t what adulthood looked like when I imagined it as a kid!) Whether it is your schedule or your children’s, it can be hard to find time and money for a healthy, tasty home-cooked. Enter… (drumroll, please!) the slow cooker. Your slow cooker provides you with another way to prepare tasty meals for your family. The best part? You don’t even have to be there while dinner bubbles away. You can be working. Or shopping. Or (if you’re a luckier gal than me), hanging out at the sauna.

Basic Crockpot Stuff

Slow cooker, crockpot, they’re all the same. You’re probably used to hearing the latter, but whatever you want to call them, you get the same thing. Don’t have a slow cooker? I completely suggest you go out and buy one. Want to use your current crockpot a bit more efficiently. Now that’s where we can help. There are a few things you should know to give you a great chance at creating a successful meal. (Yes, even a slow cooker meal can be horrible if you don’t follow some basic tips!) No one wants to come home with a hearty appetite and find a pot full of mush. Yuuuummm… (not!)

First, of course, if you don’t have a crock pot you’ve gotta buy one. So let’s start there. Cock pots come in various sizes. You can pick one up as small as one quart to as large as five quarts– so which to choose depends entirely on what fits your needs. If you come across a larger pot, that’s great for a large family. Depending on your family size or the amount of people you’ll be preparing meals for with it, you may find the larger the slow cooker the better it will work. Even if you have an itty-bitty family of two, larger pots are great, as you can fill the freezer with leftovers for quick homemade lunches.

How Your Crockpot Works

All crockpots are essentially the same– they come with removable inner pots that allow for easier serving at the dinner table. Instead of crouching over the kitchen counter, the removable inner core allows everyone to sit at the table and spoon their food onto the plate instead of standing at the stove. Some even come equipped with a non-stick inner pot, making clean up less messy.

Though form is the same, temperature settings tend to vary among slow cookers. Some have as few as two settings (high and low) while others include five settings, varying from high (get that roast cooked up in two hours) to ultra low, really slow cooking temperature (cook it in ten hours, instead, until it’s falling-apart tender). There may also be a warm setting in case the food has finished cooking but you just aren’t ready to serve it up yet.

Watching the Heat

But you’ve gotta be careful with your heat settings, though. Just like ovens, temperatures and settings on your crockpot’s dial are generally a rough estimate. You don’t be like me who, at the expense of my meal, turned my roast into dried beef cinders the first time I used a crockpot!! Even though I had it set to the eight hour setting to cook throughout the day, my slow cooker’s temp runs a little high, and tends to cook boneless meats more quickly than I expected (though I’ve learned my lesson!). If I’d been slow-cooker-smart, I could have put dinner in the cooker when I got home from work and still had a delicious meal in just a couple hours.

Hey, you live and you learn, right?

To avoid having a beef-cinder food crisis of your own, be sure to test a new slow cooker during day that you’re at home. Start the meal in the late morning hours (put the cooker on the lowest setting) and watch how long it actually takes for your food to cook. This will tell you if you’ll need to make adjustments to cooking times or temperatures for when you’re cooking while away from the kitchen (like when you’re hanging out in that sauna, right?).

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