Like a leash for the kids or a time machine, a crockpot is a useful tool for any busy household. All you’ve gotta do is to add your ingredients and be ready stuff yourself when you get home. Like I talked about in the last article, crockpots come in lots of sizes to accommodate single people or couples and larger families.

But before you begin to lick your lips, read on for some basic tips about what to cook in your crockpot… and how.

First, there are crockpot cookbooks on the market (if you sign of for the Divine Dinner Party newsletter, in fact, we give you one for free!). Generally, these recipes adjust some of our favorite stovetop and oven recipes to be used with your crockpot. In fact, dishes you may never have thought of cooking in a crock pot can be prepared while you’re away at work. Sounds good, right?

What Goes In…

With a crockpot, you’ve always got your liquid and solid components (sounds like science, huh?) There always must be some type of liquid in the bottom of the cooker to begin the process of cooking. Without any liquid in the pot, your nice roast or chicken will simply cook to the bottom and go nuclear. Not nice. There doesn’t need to be a lot of liquid… but you’ve gotta have enough to at least cover the bottom. And the liquid is a good thing, because the juices in the meat will mingle with the liquid during cooking to create a stock.

Also keep in mind that a crock pot should be half full or fuller if you want your dish to come out right (hence the different available sizes). However, the more food you add to the pot, the slower that food will cook. No matter how much you toss in there, though, the right temperature setting will cook the food evenly without overcooking… which is the whole point right? If you aren’t careful and don’t set heat correctly you’ll probably may find that what you thought was eight hour setting cooked your chicken in two and then spent the next six drying it to a cardboard crisp. Really, it’s just a process of trial and error.

Meat and Veggie Dishes in the Crockpot

In general, meats are the most common thing you’ll cook in your crockpot. Crockpots cook and tenderize meat like almost nothing else– as long as you do it right. First the meat needs to be thawed and cleaned before adding it to the cooker. Next, as meat takes longer to cook than veggies and other ingredients, you’ll generally want to put it in the bottom of the crockpot, where the temp is higher. Also, since the liquid sits on the bottom, cooking meat there will keep it from drying out.

Depending on the size of the cut, meat can cook in the crockpot from one or two hours all the way up to ten or twelve– it just gets tastier and more tender. Veggies, however, are another story. If you plan to cook vegetables along with the meat in your crockpot, you’ll have to plan the timing a bit differently. Tough veggies like carrots and potatoes can be tossed in at the beginning of the cook time. More delicate veggies, however (think tomatoes, bell peppers, mushrooms, etc.) should generally not be added until a half-hour or so before the meal is done.

When you’re crazed and rushed (all you moms out there), slow cooking makes dinner a cinch. While it’s best to experiment with various dishes the first time to get an idea of how long your crockpot takes to cook up a particular meal, the kinds of recipes you can cook in your crockpot are really endless. And we’ll be posting tons of them here at Divine Dinner Party!

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