Watts (chipotle) wrote,

Fear the crockpot!

I've owned a crockpot for years--a reasonably nice one as far as crockpots go, since the ceramic cooking pot is removable and can make a credible serving/storing dish. Even so, it wasn't something I used very much. I doubt I've turned it on more than a half-dozen times.

I remember an amusing anti-crockpot rant in Genesis_W's journal about the evils committed by her mother with a crockpot. I don't recall anything particularly evil done with a crockpot in my family, but I'm not sure I recall anything done with a crockpot other than a roast chicken. I think my own lack of interest in crockpot cooking is just from its long association with 1950s suburbia.

But, lately it's been occurring to me that given my schedule--leaving home around 9:00–9:15 in the morning and returning around 8:00–8:15 at night--crockpot cooking might not be such a bad thing to look into. Get any pre-cooking preparation done in the morning, drop things in the crockpot, and come home to a finished meal, or at least a finished entree.

So I'm trying an experiment. A couple years back when I was poking around on the web looking for employment information in Sonoma County (the part of the SF Bay area I'd decided I wanted to move to, despite not having seen any of it!), I found a recipe for slow-roasted chipotle pork in a Sonoma newspaper. It's a simple recipe but quite good--and hopefully a fine recipe for a crockpot.

The only problem I see is that a lot of crockpot recipes are intended for 4-6 hours of cooking, not 10 . Yes, I know people will say, "But the idea of a crockpot is that it won't burn, you can just cook forever!"--and I strongly suspect that notion is at the heart of so many bad crockpot meals. I'm taking a chance on the pork chiefly because it's intended to be falling apart at the end of cooking (it becomes filling for soft tacos, essentially).

So I'll see what's happened by the time I get home tonight. If it doesn't work, there's always ordering pizza.

If you have any really excellent crockpot recipes (particularly ones that will deal gracefully with 10-12 hours of cooking), why not share them?

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