Slow Cooked Blues

Ode to a Slow Cooker

Crock pot, oh crock pot
I do love you so
You feed my whole family
Without you it’s all sloppy joe

No pots and no pans
No mess and no fuss
Our nutrition you’ve saved
No fast food for us

So here’s to my slow cooker
I do not regret
Converting you from planter
For meals we’re now set


Now that a reversal in financial fortunes has caused me to convert my mostly figurehead role of domestic princess into the more active role of chief cook and maid, I find myself in the unenviable position of having to cook meals on a somewhat regular basis. Husband and youngest child find themselves in the unenviable positions of having to eat said meals, so they think their positions are somewhat worse off than mine. To that end, I’ve discovered that my crock pot is useful for soooo much more than just holding the outgoing mail.

My crock pot, together with the “Fix-It and Forget-It Cookbook” have become my best friends. They’ve been in my house for a long time but I don’t know how I managed to get along without using them for so many years. Just throw the required ingredients into the crock and voila, hours later, dinner! No dirty pots, no dirty oven, and there’s nary a bad recipe in the book! I would venture to say that without these two items, and throw in my food processor because there’s no way this domestic princess is ever going to cry over chopped onions, my family would be eating on the cheap at Burger King every night, nutrition be damned, I’ve got fingernails to preserve.

I have friends who can whip up a nutritious and delicious meal from the most rudimentary ingredients. If they had beer and tomatoes in their fridge, somehow by dinnertime they’d turn it into a three course gourmet feast. I think the ability to cook well’s a God given talent, and while God gave me many talents, I must have been waiting in the wrong line when he gave out cooking. If I don’t have a recipe book, I can cook three things: scrambled eggs, spaghetti with bottled tomato sauce and meatloaf, and the meatloaf’s if-fy.

I like watching The Learning Channel and they have a program, Take Home Chef. I’ve only watched it start to finish once, because the things they cook are way too ambitious for me, and of course I really do think that the yummiest thing on that show is the chef himself and let’s not go that way, but cooking really is an art. I take my hat off to all the artists out there. My family will have to be content with other people’s slow-cooked hall of fame recipes. I’ll shed a tear of regret into my crock pot for all those never-to-be-cooked gourmet meals as I plop together all tonight’s ingredients, and then I’ll get back to knitting, something I’m good at, because I just made the swap of the century. I traded a pair of my hand-knitted socks for a week’s worth of my friend’s home cooked meals. Take that, TLC!