Crock Pot Staples For Busy People

Or cooking at home when the schedule screams drive-through

The woman who gave me my crock pot was one of the few enemies I have ever had in my life. She gave it to me grudgingly as a wedding present (my husband was her colleague), and then she tried to break up my marriage several months later. She actually tried to set my husband up on a date with another woman after we were married. She may have thought she was Jolene in Dolly Parton’s song by that name, and she wanted me to beg her not to take my man. The thing is, nobody Yankee is named Jolene, and where I come from, women learn the martial art of Brooklyn Fu. I am a peace-loving woman, but I know how to cut more than meat.

My husband didn’t go out on that date, but I can only assume the crock pot was intended somehow as an insult to me. It isn’t an elegant instrument. It is not an expensive item to buy. Perhaps she thought it marked me as boring and domestic, hum-drum, easily replaceable. She spent a great deal of effort, after all, trying to replace me.

How wrong she was! Nothing I make in that crock pot is hum-drum, and believe me, I wasn’t going to be replaced. Don’t mess with Brooklyn! Seriously, don’t make me come over there, with or without my crock pot! That woman wasn’t going to scare me off. Even a death threat from a Klansman serious enough to engender multiple conversations with the FBI was not enough to scare me away from the South, which I find beautiful and filled with promise, spiritually enriching and filled with genius. I am here to stay, and I am keeping my crock pot with me while it bubbles.

Not only am I still married, but I am also still using the crock pot she gave me. Success is the best revenge, I find. I have been using the crockpot successfully. It finds its way into my cooking habits almost once a week. The woman who gave it to me is now deceased (and no, I wasn’t the cause, not even if looks could kill), but her gift of a crock pot lives on, making my household a happier one, particularly when my husband and I are too busy to to plan a formal meal of any kind. Those are the kinds of days a lot of Americans face lately, ones where they reckon they might as well go to a fast-food drive-through window. Who has the time to cook?

Darling food friends, a person who manages to cook without having the time to cook owns a crock pot. My mother and father hated to cook. They could afford to dine out. Most of us would be wiser to economize a bit, not spend every night out at a different eatery. My childhood household never had a crock pot. Who needed one when we could simply walk in the restaurant and ask for a table?

A person who manages to cook without having the time to cook owns a crock pot.

Let me take a wild guess, food friend. You are stressed out a lot of the time right now. Your life feels busy and complicated on a lot of days. It seems impossible to plan a meal because you hold either multiple jobs or a single job that feels like multiple jobs. Maybe you have kids. Maybe you take care of older people, too, in your household. How on earth would you ever have the time to make a meal for yourself? Some chefs on TV propose dinner in 30 minutes, and that’s wonderful. Sometimes 30 minutes of uninterrupted time, however, would be a miraculous pause in the chaos. The beauty of a crock pot is that it allows you cut up a bunch of ingredients, and with minimal preparation, slow cook them until they are absolutely delicious. Most things that come out of a crock pot are better for you than the double burger and the giant order of fries at fast-food place. If you are too busy to cook, get a crock pot, and the crock pot will do most of the cooking for you.

I am going to teach you 3 crock pot recipes that are staples in my house whenever I am too busy to cook. I also have a dessert recipe for some leftovers.

Anne’s Easy Crock Pot Ratatouille

Ratatouille is a staple of Southern French cuisine, and Americans have a tendency to believe it is a rarified haute cuisine dish. I wonder if that is because (especially if one pronounces the “r” correctly,) it is hard for the English speaker to say. However snooty-sounding the word may be to the American ear, this is not a snooty food. Rather, it is a simple dish that traditionally gets cooked with slightly overripe tomatoes and other vegetables in a big pot over a low flame for hours. Traditionally, French home cooks make this dish while they are making other kinds of more complicated recipes. This makes it a fine candidate for the crock pot.

It is almost impossible to put too much red wine and too many herbs in ratatouille.

You could prepare this recipe, as thousands of sleepy French mothers have done for centuries, with a baby screaming and a dog barking in the room, it’s so easy. (The screaming baby and barking dog are optional.) Know that you can do this!

First, cut up a large eggplant (or two small ones). Then cut up 2 zucchini, or as I have done here in the photo above, a zucchini and a summer squash — that was what my refrigerator yielded up when I opened the vegetable drawer. Then cut up some bell peppers. Here I have cut up two orange bell peppers. Then cut up a couple of onions. Do you have any slightly wrinkly tomatoes in your fridge? They belong in the ratatouille! Alternately, add two cans of diced tomatoes. Then, cut up parsley and basil — fresh if possible, dried if not — and add dried thyme and oregano in abundance. Add also at least a cup of red wine (which will cook off any alchohol before you are done and at least a quarter cup of olive oil (though most chefs add four times that amount). I use a jar of minced garlic I keep in my fridge. I add at least two tablespoons of it.

With all those ingredients put in the crock pot, I turn it on to the “low” setting, and when I go to work, I have this dish ready to serve with rice and some kind of meat for my carnivorous husband:

Ratatouille is vegan and utterly delicious.

Because this is so easy to make and so healthy, I almost always have a plastic container of home-made crock pot ratatouille in my refrigerator. My husband doesn’t love many vegetables, but he eats ratatouille without complaint.

Anne’s hearty and easy crockpot chicken soup

I take about 3 pounds of raw deboned chicken and drop it in the crock pot.

If I have leftover chicken meat from another night, I can use this instead. If I am not in a hurry, I make my chicken soup the old school way, placing a whole chicken in a large stock pot over a low flame, bones and all, and I boil it for a day, let it cool, and debone the bird the next day. The bones are marvelous for flavor. However ,this recipe in the crockpot assumes you don’t have that kind of time.

Then, I chop carrots, celery, an onion, and fennel (I added one fennel bulb here and one whole chicken’s meat), and red potatoes. I chop a great deal of parsley and add a great deal of thyme, salt, and pepper. I pour a cup of white wine and in 4-6 cups of chicken stock, enough to cover all the ingredients but not enough to overflow the pot.

Then, I set the crock pot on low and go to work. When I get home, I find I have this for dinner:

This soup is so delicious and hearty, it’s no wonder that grandmothers trust chicken soup to have medicinal properties.

This week, my husband and I have consumed about half of a crock pot’s worth of this soup. The rest is in my fridge and should last at least a week there. I could freeze it if I thought I would not use it during that time, but by Monday, I suspect it will be gone. I served this to us for dinner with biscuits.

Anne’s crockpot curried brisket

It is easy to imagine stews and soups in the crock pot, but it can be used to slow cook meat, provided that one browns it first in a frying pan.

This recipe uses a section of beef brisket cut from a much larger piece of meat that my husband and I froze and ate in smaller portions. The size here was plenty to feed us dinner.

I cross-hatch the meat on both sides before browning so that the meat will not curl up in the frying pan.

Note that I have taken a knife and cross-cut lines on both sides of the defrosted (and raw) brisket so that I can make sure it browns without curling up. Note, too ,that I cut up herbs and mini yellow bell peppers here.

I chopped thick slices of yellow mini bell peppers, cilantro, basil and parsley to add to the crock pot as the meat cooks.

The next thing I did was to heat some vegetable oil in a pan, salt and pepper the portion of brisket, and to brown it on both sides. I removed the brisket and deglazed the pan with red wine, scraping the bottom of the pan so that any browned bits that stuck to the pan became part of the cooking liquid.

Note that I am quickly browning the meat, not cooking it all the way through.

After scraping the pan and after the alcohol boils off, I pour what’s left in the crock pot over the meat.

I then placed the brisket in the bottom of the crock pot, poured over the deglazing from the pan, added the chopped herbs and peppers, and then I added a can of coconut milk and a small jar of red Thai curry paste. Note that I know NOTHING about Thai cooking. I only know that the flavors of these ingredients are delicious when combined.

As I went to work, turning the crock pot on low, the crock pot was only half full with these ingredients.

When I got home, I steamed some frozen broccoli florets in the microwave, made rice in the rice cooker, and here is what dinner looked like:

This is my curried crock pot brisket with yellow peppers, broccoli and rice.

The beef was tender like pulled pork, and it smelled spicy and delicious.

The next day, I took the leftover rice and made this recipe:

Anne’s coconut and date rice pudding.

This recipe was not made in a crock pot. Instead, I took a cup of rice left over from the night before, added sugar, vanilla, cinnamon, ground ginger, and nutmeg, diced dates, dried coconut, and a pinch of salt. In another bowl, I mixed four eggs with a can of coconut milk and poured one bowl into the other, mixing evenly (though with so many lumpy ingredients, one should not anticipate a perfectly even consistency.

Since it was Valentine’s Day, I baked the mixture in the oven in this pan:

This pudding has coconut slices and dates in it.I am cooking it in a water bath.

I cooked it in a water bath at 325 degrees for about an hour and fifteen minutes. I found it was too sticky to quite come out of its mold while retaining this heart shape, but it was a mellow and sweet dessert.

Because of its dried fruit and spices, this rice pudding almost reminds one of bread pudding. it is not very pretty, but it is delicious.

So you see that I got about a work week’s worth of food from these recipes. What my husband’s creepy ex-colleague has meant for harm, the American pantry has turned for good. These are my recipes for when I have zero time to cook but just enough time to chop and pour. It is healthier than eating fast food, and it is much more enjoyable than a corporate hamburger eaten in one’s car.

I wish you the miracle of home-cooked meals. Even as your schedule fills up, may your mouths fill with good food made in a warm American kitchen. Blessings to you on this Sunday. May your households smell like herbs and spices.

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Grocery List and recipes

Meat/Dairy

Eggs

Brisket (This is a large purchase, and I used a third of it here. The rest of it is in my freezer).

1 chicken (or at least 3 pounds of chicken meat)

Produce

1 bag of baby carrots

1 celery

1 fennel bulb

1 eggplant

1 zucchini

1 yellow squash

1 bag of mini peppers (or a few large peppers in a variety of colors)

1 bag of onions

1 bag of red potatoes

1 bunch of parsley

1 bunch of fresh basil

1 bunch of fresh cilantro

Groceries/dry goods

Ground cinnamon

Ground nutmeg

Ground ginger

1 bottle of vanilla extract

dried thyme

Dried oregano

1 jar of minced garlic

1 bag of chopped dates

1 bag of rice

1 bag of granulated sugar

1 bottle of vegetable oil

1 bottle of extra virgin olive oil

1 bag of frozen broccoli florets

2 cans of diced tomatoes

1 can of tomato paste

2 cans of coconut milk

1 jar of Thai red curry

Alcohol

1 bottle of red wine (I used a bottle of Beaujolais Villages)

1 bottle of white wine (I used a bottle of Riesling)

Note that the alcohol is optional. It can be replaced with stock. Note, though, that when the cooking is done, the alcohol in these recipes will have boiled off, leaving only flavor.

These ingredients cost around $150 (more if you get a larger brisket), including the alcohol. There is a good chance, however, that you have a lot of these things already at your house, and if you buy these ingredients, you will have leftover potatoes, sugar, oil and spices to use later in future recipes.

Anne’s Easy Crock Pot Ratatouille

1 large eggplant, chopped into half moons

1 zucchini, sliced

1 yellow Summer squash, sliced

2 bell peppers, sliced

2 onions, sliced

2 cans of diced tomatoes (or 2 pounds of fresh tomatoes, diced — in this recipe, however, I don’t think it makes much of a difference)

At least 3 tablespoons of garlic

At least 1 cup of extra virgin olive oil

At least 1 cup of red wine

At least 1 tablespoon of dried thyme

At least 1 tablespoon of dried oregano

1/4 cup of fresh basil, chopped

1/4 cup of fresh parsley, chopped

1 can of tomato paste

Take all the ingredients above (except for the tomato paste), and put them in the crock pot. Cook at the “low” setting for at least 3 hours.

Shortly before serving, add the can of tomato paste, and mix thoroughly into the ratatouille. After about 15 minutes on low, it is ready to serve.

Anne’s hearty and easy crockpot chicken soup

3 pounds of chicken (or more), deboned and chopped

1 bulb of fennel, chopped

6 stalks of celery, chopped

1 onion, chopped

4 potatoes, chopped

1/2 a pound of carrots, chopped

At least 1 cup of white wine

6-8 cups of chicken stock (or perhaps water if you intend to boil your own bone broth with a whole chicken, but this is the easier way)

1 tablespoon of dried thyme

1/4 cup of parsley, chopped

Place all these ingredients in the crock pot and cook on the low setting for at least 4 hours.

Anne’s crockpot curried brisket

1/3 of a brisket, cross-hatched with a knife, salted and peppered (as shown above)

2 tablespoons of vegetable oil

1 cup of red wine

2 bell peppers, chopped (or the equivalent number of mini peppers)

1/4 cup of cilantro, chopped

1/4 cup of fresh basil, chopped

1/4 cup of parsley, chopped

1 jar of red Thai curry

1 can of coconut milk

First, heat the oil in a frying pan on a high flame.

Then, brown the brisket on both sides. The goal is not to cook it thoroughly, only to brown the outside.

Remove the brisket, and put it in the crock pot.

With the heat on low, pour the wine in the frying pan to deglaze it. Scrape all the brown bits left in the pan from the brisket into the liquid. Once the alcohol is burned off (you will smell that there is no more evaporation of it), pour the contents of the frying pan over the brisket. Add all the other ingredients mentioned above. Cook all this on the low setting of the crock pot for around four hours at least.

Anne’s coconut and date rice pudding.

1 cup of leftover white rice

1 can of coconut milk

4 eggs

1 teaspoon of vanilla extract

1/4 cup of chopped dates

1/4 cup of toasted coconut or flake coconut

Ground ginger

Ground nutmeg

Ground cinnamon

1/2 a cup of sugar

A pinch of salt

Preheat the oven at 325 degrees.

Mix all the dry ingredients in one mixing bowl.

Beat the eggs with the coconut milk. Note that this will not necessarily be fully combined; this is a bit of a rustic recipe, and the end result will taste delicious but will be a bit less smooth. (If you would prefer to have a more classic, shiny rice pudding, substitute the coconut milk for 1 1/2 cups of heavy cream).

Fold the egg mixture into the dry ingredients.

Pour into a baking pan.

Put the pan in a larger pan, and pour water in that larger pan so that it surrounds it at least half-way up the pan’s height with water. This is called a bain marie by French chefs, and it allows for the ingredients to be cooked at a more stable temperature.

Bake for an hour and fifteen minutes.