Jayne’s sister gave us a slow cooker that she didn’t want any more. Today I am using it for the first time and I can’t really get my head around it. The thing is huge: I bought a load of stuff for a stew yesterday in the quantities that would normally fill my old stew dish and it only half filled the thing so I had to shove a few more onions and a spud in there to make it up.
It just doesn’t seem natural though – cooking outside the oven. And its slow, but the clue was in the name. I like to put a stew on about 4 for a couple of hours then leave it on 2 for ages, and when you do that you can see it bubbling away. This slow cooker seems to be doing nothing.
Smells good though – but that’s just the thyme.
What about dumplings? It’s not worth doing a stew if you can’t do dumplings.
I did dumplings – my special ‘jazz dumplings’ (so called because I think Herby Dumplings sounds like a good name for a sax player)
I was worried about them, not knowing how long they would take in a slow cooker. Turns out they need a bit longer than they do in the oven, so they were still a bit on the stodgy side by the time the spuds were ready. I’ll give them an extra 5 or 10 minutes next time I think.
No complaints though. As you can imagine, we are not averse to stodgy food in this house…