Sunday, June 7, 2009

Set it, Forget it.

For my first post back from my sabbatical, I've chosen to highlight my new favorite money-saving kitchen item, the slow cooker. This thing is magical. You toss in some meat or veg with a little liquid and a chopped onion, and eight hours later it's delicious!
My impetus for devoting a post to it is that Lisa was in a national grocery chain the other day and discovered they were selling (on special!) one pound of pulled pork for sandwiches or tacos for 15, count 'em, fifteen dollars. We thought this odd, since we'd recently hosted a multitude of friends for pulled pork tacos over Memorial Day. What we payed was $7 for five pounds of pork butt. Granted I had to get up early before going to work to toss it in the Crock Pot with a quart of salsa, some chili powder and cocoa powder, but after that I could set it, speed off to work, and by the time I got home, we were ready to go with barbecue pulled pork - five pounds of it, I reiterate - with only the shells and fixings left to set out. Here's how it turned out:





Over the last few months we have discovered some excellent, cheap, and above all easy recipes that involve a minimal amount of cash and effort but yield a ludicrous amount of food. Most feed us for several days on a single afternoon of hands-off preparation.
Some of our favorites from around the web are the KC Stuffed Green Peppers, which you can find here. It's ground beef centric, but could easily be altered to use ground turkey or even some sort of mock-something for those of the vegetarian persuasion. We also really enjoyed the Autumn Vegetable Beef Stew, which can be found here.
The basic principle is this: you don't want expensive cuts of meat, because when you cook it for so long you want all that fat and connective tissue to intensify the flavor and make it so tender it'll just fall right off the bone. This is what makes it really conducive to budget cooking. One of my favorites is for barbecue beef sandwiches. You buy three pounds of chuck roast, one of the more collagen-heavy, cheaper beef cuts, and rub it with flour. Toss it in the slow cooker with a can of tomato sauce, a chopped onion and a clove of minced garlic, a handful of brown sugar, maybe a pinch of mustard powder, chili powder, whatever you like, and a couple cubes of beef bouillon. Eight hours later you have the most delicious barbecue beef that falls apart as you put it on a toasted bun, and all your friends will thank you for it. Or you can keep it for yourself and it'll feed you for damn near a week's worth of bag lunches.
Slow cooker, I sing praises to thee.

No comments:

Post a Comment