slow cooker quick questions thread

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Hi geek0,

As nell says, it will be fine. There is a tendency to add to much liquid to the slow cooker resulting in far too much sauce at the end. It's better to add less and allow the juices to concentrate. I've added your question into the slow cooker quick questions thread as your post may help other users.

Enjoy your stew.

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geek0

Thanks guys thought it was ok but just wanted to check id hate to go 8 hrs then realise it was done wrong . Just need to perfect my pastry and i,ll have some lovely meat and potatoe pie with the leftovers, im loving the old style cooking and savings im making, the struggle is to get the DS(7) to eat it am afraid hes grown up with a lot of convenience items around but times are difficult now hopefully he,ll get used to it.

babyjackal

Hi there, my slow cooker recipe book often asks for condensed beef broth (it's American). I've looked in my local sainsbury's but can't seem to find any, just the tomato one. Any suggestions please very gratefully received!!

tik33

Hi everyone,

I want to buy a slow cooker online (just can't face those queues...) as a pressie for my wife and I'm really struggling to make a decision about which one to go for. Someone at work says that I should go for round and tall because it takes up less space on the worktop (our kitchen is small) and you don't have to fill it up if you don't want. However the morphy richards get great reviews - both 6.5 & 3.5 - but not having seen one it's hard to tell how big it is - also is the height too shallow for putting chickens and lamb etc. in?

so, tall and round or short and oval? (it's also really hard to find dimensions) - so if you've bought a tall and round one - make and model and where you bought it would be fantastic!

also, should I get a special slow cookbook to go with it???

thanks everyone - looking forward to lovely food after Christmas (might even give it early...!):rotfl:

FairyElephant_2

Hi tik33 - I hope your wife wants a slow cooker - otherwise you might get a frosty reception at Xmas - LOL! (I recall one year my dad getting my mum a carpet-sweeper.....they didn't speak until after Boxing day!) - personally I have asked for a bread-maker...I don't mind having household gadgets!

Anyhow - I really wish my SC was oval - I like to cook turkey drumsticks (yummy & cheap!) but mine is round so I have to saw off the end of the bone to fit them in!

You will probably find that most come with a basic recipe book, and there are loads of recipes on here - you could print them out and put them into a folder for her, making your own personalised SC recipe book (and then you'll know there are recipes you like the sound of!).

HTH,

FE

Wee_Bargain_Hunter

Well I bought one recently so hope this helps you. There's a thread about here somewhere about buying a sc and I read through it. I went for the 6.5 oval MR. 6.5 - because I want to batch cook and freeze portions for again. Also you don't HAVE to fill it up, it's ok to half fill it. Oval - so I can fit a chicken in it. I also like the glass lid to see whats going on as you're not supposed to open it. It also has straight edges as opposed to rounded, so is easily washed in the dw. Only improvement I would make is to have a pot that can be used directly on the hob to soften veg/brown meat but it's not a big deal to transfer stuff from a pan. I'll try to post dimensions later. btw there's a small white 3.5? sc on sale in Tesco's for about £10 at the moment if you want to try one out without risking too much money.
MR recommend a book by somebody Lewis. However after looking on here for recipe inspiration I was a bit disappointed with this and other sc books I've seen. Maybe get a few introduction pages copied in a library and put them in a folder with some recipes from the threads here? Stews and soups are quite easy - maybe you could surprise her with a meal that you've cooked yourself!

tik33

thanks to you both for your replies.

like your ideas of doing a 'made-to-measure' cookery book and I think I'll put in a voucher for a meal cooked by me!

thanks WBH - but I have the internal dims of the MR 6.5L (I phoned their helpline) - and just in case anyone else wants them they are here:

6.5L - external dims: 270mm (w) * 246mm (h) * 390mm (l)
internal dims: 190(w) * 130(h) * 310 (l)

3.5L - external: 250w * 230h *350l
internal: 190w * 120h * 230l

Have you (or anyone else that owns a MR) had trouble with joints of meat sticking too far out the top?

3.5L gets slightly better reviews on amazon - we are a family of 2 + 1 baby - but like to eat a lot and would be good to have stuff left over - when I spoke to the helpline they reckoned that the 3.5L is good for 2-4 and that the 6.5L is good for up to 8 people - which may be too much for the 2 of us - but maybe you can half fill it?

I'd be annoyed if I bought the 3.5L and couldn't fit joints of meat in it!

Thanks all

nell2

tik33 wrote: »

thanks to you both for your replies.

like your ideas of doing a 'made-to-measure' cookery book and I think I'll put in a voucher for a meal cooked by me!

thanks WBH - but I have the internal dims of the MR 6.5L (I phoned their helpline) - and just in case anyone else wants them they are here:

6.5L - external dims: 270mm (w) * 246mm (h) * 390mm (l)
internal dims: 190(w) * 130(h) * 310 (l)

3.5L - external: 250w * 230h *350l
internal: 190w * 120h * 230l

Have you (or anyone else that owns a MR) had trouble with joints of meat sticking too far out the top?

3.5L gets slightly better reviews on amazon - we are a family of 2 + 1 baby - but like to eat a lot and would be good to have stuff left over - when I spoke to the helpline they reckoned that the 3.5L is good for 2-4 and that the 6.5L is good for up to 8 people - which may be too much for the 2 of us - but maybe you can half fill it?

I'd be annoyed if I bought the 3.5L and couldn't fit joints of meat in it!

Thanks all

I think you can make a case for getting both at some point - perhaps get the 3.5L now and then get the bigger one in a year or two when your little one is bigger. I've got the 3.5 and have asked Father Christmas for the bigger one this year. The reason I wanted the bigger one is so that I can have more leftovers - I cook for 4 in my 3.5 (and there isn't usually much, if any, left over). You can get a 3lb chicken into the 3.5, and I often put in a piece of brisket which feeds 4 for a roast dinner, and then provides enough leftovers to make cottage pie the following day.
Beware of buying the larger one if you are going to struggle to fill it. They have to be at least half full to work effectively and half of the 6.5l is still quite a lot. I agonised about which one to buy. If I were you, I would rephrase the question and ponder which one to buy first! One of my friends has got both and uses them both very regularly!

I would agree with other people that you don't need loads of slow cooker recipe books. Just read the lovely suggestions on here, and you will be amazed. However, if you think a book would be a good idea to help your wife gain a bit of confidence with it, the one I would recommend is Slow Cooking Properly Explained by Dianne Page. It's £4.24 on Amazon. Btw, if you haven't looked at the Amazon prices for the slow cookers you are interested in, then it might be worth a look. That's where my big one has been ordered from! (But I'm not allowed to look until Christmas!)

PS Thank you for posting the dimensions for the bigger slow cooker. Am going to go and look in my kitchen to see if the space I'm keeping for my Christmas pressie is going to be big enough!

tik33

thanks Nell, that's good advice. I think I'll go with the small one to start with and see how we get on - as you say, if we love it then we'll go larger - or have 2 which it seems a lot of people have (after all, i suppose people have lots of sizes of saucepan!) - but might have to wait until we have a bigger kitchen!

While the recipes on here I'm sure are fantastic - it's nice to have a book to go with it - so thanks for the recommendation - and at under a fiver it's in the budget!

I'm going to order on Monday from Amazon (I'd noted that they had good prices) and maybe see if I can go and see one of them in the flesh - much better than looking hard at my tape measure...

csarina

My OH has been put on a low salt, non just about everything diet for a condition called vertingous migraine, I have invested in a small slow cooker to make stock etc and it occured to me to ask if you can use it like a bain marie and make egg custard/ creme caramel in it????