My name is Tai Tai Johnson, and I hate crock pots.
Or so I thought.
Until this fall.
{Until this week actually.}
I remember offering our oldest daughter, when she was a toddler, a mini cooked carrot that had roasted beside a beef roast with, no doubt, a sodium rich packet of french onion soup mix and a few diced onions in a bath of water, in a crock pot for 4+ hours. Baby Millsie was delighted by the familiar sight of a the tiny carrot (the likes of which Barbara Kingsolver of
Animal Vegetable Miracle calls 'lathed carrots' since they actually machined from larger carrots), but upon sampling the mush ... which quickly lost its carrot shape and tasted so unlike what she had expected ... she promptly spit it out and looked at me as if I'd betrayed her. She, apparently, was not a big fan of the crock pot either.
There has always been something off-putting about the crock pot for me. I don't like the steamy smells of a crock pot in which the aroma (and flavor) of individual foods has become a single combination. I'm irritated with strange directions that suggest simply dumping everything together and leaving it for four or eight hours. (I find this a conundrum as well. Are people's lives so often compartmentalized into four hour blocks? What if you have six hours, or four and a half? What if you start out on 'low' and then plans change?) My distaste comes from an amalgamation of several other issues as well: the frequent ingredients (cans of condensed soup or instant soup packets), the texture of the food it creates (somewhere between boiled and disintegrated), and perhaps even the enthusiasm so many others have for a kitchen appliance I have found so appalling. There are entire websites and blogs devoted to crock pots. Entire sections of cookbooks. Don't even get me started on the Pinboards with clever crock pot names.
In China, many of my American
tai tai friends schlepped their crock pots over to the Middle Kingdom in their sea containers. Never did we have a
tai tai gathering without someone's beloved crock pot ... a Medusa of wires stretching from the machine and wall socket with a power adapter in between ... converting China's shocking 220 v into a voltage more crock pot friendly. I get that it was comforting to have familiar objects and comfort foods. I simply never formed an attachment to my crock pot.
Back on this side of the international dateline, I further understand people's facilitation and even dependence on crock pots. Work and busy schedules often demand a low impact dinner preparation. I get that it works for many people to prepare a meal at breakfast that will be ready after the work day to serve for supper. I just don't like those kinds of meals.
Or do I?
It was good old Ben and the Pinterest team that sparked the possibility that pulling the crock pot out of storage might be worth a try.
I used it to make steel cut oats one morning last spring. The oats actually cook in a glass bowl which is set in a hot bath in my old enemy the crock pot. Plug it in at bedtime, steel cut oats for breakfast. The texture is steel cut oat texture. The smell is steel cut oats. I would simply not have time on a school morning to make this healthy high fiber option.
{My resistance to the crock pot faded minimally.}
Next up, my friend Mavis over at One Hundred Dollars a Month posted a Italian Chicken soup for the crock pot. This last Sunday before we left for weekend Chinese school I assembled the soup in the crock pot and set it for 4 hours on high. It wasn't my favorite, but the family seemed to like it. (They all agreed they'd like to have it again ... which is more than I can say for my Dinosaur Kale chips!)
I doubled the recipe and used orzo pasta that cooked nicely without bloating. (The orzo was my only substitution and made a nice addition. I think this is noteworthy because I am famous around The Bungalow for my penchant for culinary substitutions ... which explains why I'm a better cook than baker, and may, come to think of it, explain why my previous foray into Crock Pot Land may have left much to be desired ... I think with crock pots one must follow rules pretty closely. I've never been a good rule follower ingredient wise ... I find rule following, and until now crock pots, rather main stream.)
On Tuesday night after a group trip to the orthodontist (the fact that our seven-year-old has joined ranks with her sisters as a patient of orthodontia is fodder for another post), we dined on the reheated remains of Sunday's soup. (Reheated, in the crock pot for two hours on low whilst we were visited aforementioned ortho, who may force us to take out a second mortgage on our home before The Three have perfectly aligned pearly whites.) You know what? The soup was even better the second time around.
Emboldened by my success, I made a pot of decadent crock pot hot chocolate for an afternoon snack for the girlies today. The ingredients are rich and so I used more milk and less cream ... which I'm not sure makes much a difference when you add a WHOLE BAG of CHOCOLATE CHIPS and a WHOLE CAN of SWEETENED CONDENSED MILK!! The adaptations worked. Two of the three girls liked it. Our oldest was the main dissenter ... but then again, she's never really cared for crock pots.
