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How I use it is to spend around an hour or so preparing a meal which, once cooked, I then divide into 6 or 8 portions twice a week. I then eat the portions for lunch and dinner for the next however many days they last before preparing the next meal on the morning of the day when I only have lunch left in the fridge if you see what I mean.
I borrowed a whole selection of books specifically about slow cooking from my local library and also read various articles online and the general gist was that you could use any casserole recipe designed to go into the oven provided you reduced the liquid you were adding by half and made sure you brought everything up to boiling point before putting the inner into the slow cooker.
In practice I've found that the liquid varies by what's actually in the pot, red lentils soak up an amazing amount of stock and so do chick peas for example. Then the second point is very important as what the slow cooker does is keep everything ticking over so if you start your recipe off cold it takes ages to heat up before it begins to cook but if you heat a tablespoon of oil and brown all your ingredients in it and then add hot stock, bring it all to a nice simmer and then pour it all into the pot it will come back to that nice simmer and be going along beautifully straight away and smelling wonderful too. The browning everything off gives you a nicer flavour as well so it's worth doing for that alone.
There are treasure troves of recipes available online such as this link below
https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/uk/slow-cooker-meals/
Have a great time experimenting and noshing your results.
and pulses - do they need an initial boil like kidney beans? Or can they go in as is?