Tag Archives: Slow Cooker

Mexican-Style Pork and Hominy Stew

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‘Tis maybe the season for good cheer, but it’s also the season for stews, braises and the slow cooker! Since there are probably a hundred recipes in this book that I haven’t tried yet, expect to see more dishes from it in the coming months.

Conversely, these days I am having a hard time talking myself into making ice cream, even though there are still a few recipes in Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams at Home that I still want to make.

An ice cream-making slave for Christmas? Yes, please.

After the overeating fest that is Thanksgiving time, I haven’t been baking/cooking much. This is about the most complicated thing that has come out of my kitchen for a couple of weeks. Even my sourdough starters are feeling neglected.

This stew starts out by pureeing a can of hominy and chicken broth until smooth. That goes in the slow cooker, along with a bunch of onions that have been softened in the microwave, tomato paste, chili powder, garlic, oregano, diced tomatoes, more hominy, soy sauce and cubes of boneless pork butt. Then, you take carrots, slice them up and wrap them in foil and put the foil packet on top of the stew (this keeps them from getting mushy). The whole thing cooks on high for 5 to 7 hours, or low for 9 to 11 hours. When the pork is tender, you add the carrots and any juices into the stew and stir in lime juice and fresh cilantro.

I skipped that last step, but I wouldn’t recommend it. While the stew is good, very thick and hearty, it needs that little bit of freshness that lime juice and cilantro would give it. I love the flavor of the hominy with the pork, and because you puree part of the hominy, every bite is full of corny flavor. And the carrots give the dish just enough sweetness to offset the heat of the chili powder. Like most stews, the flavor is improving with age. This is a nice alternative to beef stew or chili.

On another subject, I stumbled across this blog earlier this week and fell in love with it. A blog full of sprinkles, pink velvet roulades and 10-pound cakes? What’s not to love?

Beef Stroganoff

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If I spy a beef stroganoff recipe in a slow cooker cookbook, there’s a good chance I’m going to try it. I have a thing about beef stroganoff; I love it and have been looking for The Best recipe for years. Somehow, this recipe in this cookbook slipped below my radar. Until now. And I can confidently say, that while I don’t think this is The Best recipe, it is pretty good.

I didn’t take any pictures because a. I was lazy, b. it looked pretty brown and boring and c. I was lazy.

You start off by sauteing white mushrooms until they give up all their liquid and start browning. The mushrooms get transferred to the slow cooker, and onions, tomato paste, garlic, dried porcini mushrooms and thyme take a turn in the saute pan. Once everything is soft and starting to turn brown, you whisk in some flour, then chicken broth. This mixture gets moved to the slow cooker where it and the mushrooms are joined by wine, soy sauce, bay leaves and chunks of beef. Everything cooks, on low, for 9 to 11 hours, or until the beef is tender. Right before serving, sour cream and Dijon mustard are stirred into the slow cooker (and dill, if you have it, which I didn’t).

I really liked this dish. The beef was tender and flavorful, and the addition of the sour cream and mustard gave the stroganoff a bright flavor that wasn’t dulled by hours of cooking. I served this over spaghetti (because I didn’t have egg noodles, and all I’ve heard from Bryan since then is that stroganoff has to have egg noodles. Bah!), rice and rotelli pasta. They were all good, despite Bryan’s grumblings. I especially liked the stroganoff over rice since the stroganoff is a little liquidy and the rice soaked all that up.

The only change I would make is to increase the amount of mushrooms in the recipe. It calls for 1 1/2 pounds, and I think I’d go with two pounds. The mushrooms kind of disappeared.

Barbecued Beans

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I’ve been looking for a good recipe for barbecued beans (sometimes called cowboy beans) for many years. In my head, my perfect dish has these characteristics:

• Beans that are tender, but not so tender they fall apart at the first touch. I like my beans to have substance, you know?

• Intermingled with those beans should be little bits of meat and onions.

• The liquid should be deeply flavored, spicy with a little sweetness. The liquid should be the consistency of a thin stew, thick enough to coat the beans without overshadowing them.

Unfortunately, this bean dish fell short of my ideal. It was okay, but I know there are better recipes out there.

The dish starts off by microwaving garlic and a chopped onion until the onion is softened. That gets put into the slow cooker along with dried (not soaked!) navy beans, water, coffee, barbecue sauce, brown sugar and a couple of slices of raw bacon. This mixture cooks, on low, for 9 to 11 hours or until the beans are tender. At the end, the bacon is fished out and a few more tablespoons of barbecue sauce and mustard are stirred in. The mixture is left to sit for about 10 minutes so it can thicken a bit.

On a scale of one to ten, this recipe gets an eight or nine for ease of preparation. For taste, I’d give it about a six. The beans were perfectly cooked, but the flavor was lacking something, I just can’t put my finger on what it needed. Molasses? More spice? More depth of flavor? Probably all of those things. Another thing that I really wanted was bits of meat. Because you don’t precook the bacon, the fat gets all limp and squishy as it gives up its flavor (hence the reason you fish it out at the end), but I missed that additional texture. My search for perfect barbecued beans goes on.

This is the last recipe out of this book. Look for a wrap-up post next week.

Sloppy Joes

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You: Uh, Trista?

Me: Yes?

You: Aren’t sloppy joes supposed to be served as a sandwich?

Me: Yes, unless you live in our house where we are trying to watch our diet, and I didn’t want to buy a package of hamburger buns that we probably wouldn’t eat (or a package that we’d eat it all), and I had some potatoes languishing in the refrigerator. Then you get sloppy joe mixture over microwaved potatoes. And you know what? They were pretty good. Better than a hamburger bun that is just going to get all soggy and fall apart on you.

I had forgotten how sweet sloppy joes can be. Or how messy. Frankly, in my opinion, this dish is more for kids than it is for adults. It was sweet, sweet, sweet, thanks to a cup of ketchup and a couple of teaspoons of brown sugar. It was also a little bland.

This dish has a bit more prep work than many of the other dishes I’ve made out of this book. It starts off by having you mash together milk and two slices of sandwich bread. This gets mixed into the ground beef. Next you saute onions, garlic and chili powder until the onions have softened, and then add the ground beef and cook it until it is no longer pink. The whole lot goes into the slow cooker along with ketchup, a can of tomato sauce, brown sugar and a squirt of hot sauce. This cooks for six to eight hours on low, or until the ground beef is tender.

Like most of the other recipes out of this book, this recipe makes enough to feed a crowd and is easily doubled.

As I said above, I found this dish to be too sweet. I don’t think you need the brown sugar, and I’d even consider cutting down the amount of ketchup by a third, maybe to 2/3 of a cup or so. The mixture is pretty saucy, and the ground beef ends up in small, tender chunks. Besides using it as a sandwich filling and on baked potatoes, you could also serve the sloppy joe mixture over pasta.

Chicken Divan

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I’m having a hard time trying to think of something to say about this dish. It was good, and it was easy. I didn’t have to heat up the house to make it, and we now have plenty of leftovers. There’s nothing spectacular going on here, just filling comfort food.

You start off by browning some onions, garlic and thyme. Once the onions are browned, you make a roux by stirring in flour and cooking it for a minute, then whisking in chicken broth. This mixture goes into the slow cooker, and you add dried mustard, cream and chicken thighs. This gets cooked, on low, for four to six hours, until the chicken thighs are tender and easily shredded. To finish off the dish, you stir in shredded cheddar cheese, parmesan cheese and instant rice and let the casserole cook until the rice is tender, about 30 minutes on high. The last step is to microwave broccoli until it is tender and then stir it into the casserole. The recipe called for a topping of browned bread crumbs to be sprinkled on top of each serving, but I got lazy and left it off. I didn’t miss it a bit.

I liked the idea of cooking the broccoli separately and then stirring it in at the end. Although it is an extra step, this ensured  broccoli that was tender but not mushy. In addition, the broccoli stayed a bright green; usually, cooking broccoli in the slow cookers leaves you with gray, sad-looking spears.

Chocolate Pudding Cake

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One of my favorite desserts is Cook’s Illustrated chocolate pudding cake. It’s cake, it’s pudding, it’s both! Oh, and it is just a little bit chocolatey. Served warm with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, this dessert is heaven.

Enter Cook’s Illustrated slow cooker chocolate pudding cake. It isn’t quite as good as the original version, but during the summer when you don’t want to heat up the house, this will do, quite adequately. Especially with that scoop of vanilla ice cream melting along side of it.

Chocolate cake in a slow cooker. Who knew?

This recipe is really simple. You mix the dry ingredients (flour, sugar, cocoa powder, baking soda and salt) with the wet ingredients (milk, butter, egg yolk and vanilla) and then stir in some chocolate chips. The thick batter is spread in the bottom of the slow cooker and sprinkled with a mixture of sugar and cocoa powder. Finally, boiling water is poured over the whole thing and left to cook for about 90 minutes on high.

As the cake cooks, the boiling water mixes with the sugar and cocoa powder and moves through the batter to form a pudding on the bottom. The cake cooks up dark, dense and moist. With two kinds of chocolate (cocoa powder and chocolate chips), this dessert is not for the faint of heart. It is comfort food of the highest order. And it came out of the slow cooker! This was a nice change from stews and chilis.

Texas Chili

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This is definitely one of my favorite recipes out of this book. I gladly ate this chili for an entire week; it just kept getting better and better.

The chili starts off by microwaving onions, chili powder, tomato paste, oil, garlic, cumin and oregano. Once the onions have softened, you dump the mixture into the slow cooker and add red kidney beans, tomato puree, chicken broth, tapioca (for thickening the chili), soy sauce, chipotle chilis, a bit of sugar and bay leaves. Finally, beef chuck is cut into 1 1/2-inch cubes and nestled into the liquid. The chili cooks on low for 9 to 11 hours or until the beef is tender.

As I was preparing the chili, I realized that I had accidentally picked up two 15-ounce cans of tomato paste instead of tomato puree. Rather than go back to the store, I decided to use two cans of diced tomatoes that I happened to have. I think this made my chili soupier than it would normally be, but I liked having the chunks of tomato in the chili. Next time I make this dish, I’ll probably keep the diced tomatoes instead of the sauce, but I’ll drain the tomatoes first. The other thing I’d change is to add more kidney beans, probably at least another can. The amount of beans seemed kind of skimpy for the amount of chili this recipe made. Finally, I ended up serving the chili over rice. While this chili isn’t very hot, it does have a bit of kick, and the rice tends to temper that. It also bulks out the chili and makes it more of a meal by itself.

Of course, if you like heat, you can always add more chipotles and skip the rice.

Farmhouse Chicken Corn Chowder

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This soup was . . . okay. I have much better chicken and corn chowder recipes that I’ll stick with. I became skeptical of the recipe as I was reading through the ingredient list. First, it calls for one carrot. One carrot. No self-respecting soup that comes out of my kitchen will only have one carrot. I added four carrots. Secondly, the only corn in the soup is a can of creamed corn. I added about 2 cups of frozen corn that I thawed first. With those changes, the soup was edible.

Like most of the other recipes in this book, you start out by doing some prep work. In this case, frying a couple strips of bacon until crispy, then a couple of onions, garlic tomato paste and thyme. When everything is softened, a bit of flour is stirred in, followed by chicken broth. Adding the flour thickens the soup and gives it some body. This all gets dumped into the slow cooker, along with more broth, potatoes, carrots, bay leaves and about a pound and a half of boneless, skinless chicken thighs. The soup cooks until the chicken is tender, about 4 to 6 hours on low. Once the chicken is done, you move it to a cutting board and cut it into bite-sized pieces. The chicken goes back into the slow cooker, followed by the creamed corn, cream, a couple of chipotle chiles and fresh basil.

Like I said, the soup was okay.

Easy Pesto Meatballs

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These are exactly what they sound like, little balls of meat filled with pesto. It is hard to see how or where they could go wrong, but I’m on the fence with them. I’m not sure if I like them or not.

The meatballs are made by mixing hamburger, pesto, bread crumbs, Parmesan and an egg yolk together. Once the meatballs are formed, they are microwaved for about 5 minutes so the fat renders off of them and they firm up. To make the sauce for the meatballs, jarred tomato sauce and water are stirred into the slow cooker. Once the meatballs come out of the microwave, they are nestled into the tomato sauce and left to cook, on low, for 4 to 6 hours.

The meatballs were moist and tender, but I couldn’t taste the pesto. At all. They were so tender, that they fell apart pretty easily. They also had a very strange aftertaste that I didn’t really like, and I’m not sure if it is the meatballs or the tomato sauce. One thing to note is that you should use a tomato sauce that you like, because that will be the dominate flavor of the dish.

Hearty Beef Stew

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I am officially declaring this to be the best beef stew I’ve ever made. Best. Beef. Stew. Ever.

Like most of the other recipes I’ve made out of this book, this recipe is a little more complicated than simply throwing your ingredients into the slow cooker and walking away for 8 hours. You could do that, but with just a little more work, you’ll get a whole lot more flavor.

You start out by browning onions, tomato paste, garlic and thyme on the stovetop. Once the onions are softened and lightly browned, a bit of flour is stirred in, followed by chicken broth. This give the stew some body and thickens the liquid up just enough that it clings to the meat and veggies. That mixture goes into the slow cooker followed by soy sauce, beef broth, bay leaves, chunks of beef chuck roast and salt and pepper. Then, you take carrots and potatoes, toss them with oil, salt and pepper and wrap them up in tinfoil. That tinfoil packet is placed on top of the other things in the slow cooker, and the whole shebang is cooked until the beef is tender. At the end of the cooking, the now perfectly tender steamed carrots and potatoes are removed from the tinfoil packet and stirred into the stew along with some frozen peas.

Holy crap, you should have smelled my house while this was cooking.

The little Cooks Illustrated tips, like precooking the onions, adding soy sauce and steaming the veggies separately, are genius. You get a stew that is deeply flavored with meat so tender it falls apart with the littlest prodding of a fork. The vegetables, instead of being mushy and bland, are tender without being overcooked (this is especially important when you are reheating the stew for subsequent meals).

Like I said. Best. Beef. Stew. Ever.