An Easy Recipe

Cooking with a crock pot, or slow cooker, is said to save time and money. Is there really any truth to this assumption?

Save Time With a Crock Pot - Saving time with a "slow cooker" is not quite the oxymoron that it appears to be. Yes, your meal will cook for a long time, but the time savings comes in the fact that you are not there to watch over it! You can go about your business and not even think about your meal for hours.

Gone are the days of someone being home all day to prepare the family meals. In this day and age of the busy, scattered family, we need to rely on more than one person to get dinner on the table. Because using a crock pot doesn't expose youngsters to hot burners and open flames, getting the little ones in the family, and the less experienced cooks, involved becomes much easier. Simply having someone there to help throw ingredients into the crock pot can be a big help. Now, it's a joint venture and meal preparation is shared, freeing up some much needed time for you to focus on other chores.

Even standing over a stove and stirring a pot, watching it boil so to speak, is time that you could have for something else. Once the ingredients are in the crock pot, you can walk away and get on with your day and your errands. When you walk back into your kitchen, you have a delicious meal without that time-consuming pot watching. That's certainly a time saver.

There is no such thing as a quick stop at the grocery store. But, when you're running late and there is no dinner planned, you think you can do just that - make a quick stop. After a half hour or more wandering around the aisles of the grocery store, you find yourself grabbing a few prepackaged meals and heading home. Now, you've not only put off dinner until later, but you've spent money on food you didn't really want to eat, or feed your family. With a crock pot meal planned and shopped for ahead of time, you can add that 30 minutes on to the end of your busy day and spend it with your family, instead of running around the grocery store.

Save Money With a Crock Pot - There are a couple schools of thought here. One is saving on your food, and the other is saving on energy. How exactly can cooking with a crock pot save on your food budget? And why would running a crock pot for six hours be cheaper than running your oven for three hours?

When you're at the grocery store looking at beef, for instance, you'll want to walk right by those expensive cuts and move over to the bargain cuts. Why? Slow cooking meat, at a low temperature, in a moist environment, is the best way to cook less expensive cuts. The sinew and connective tissues of the budget cuts break down under those conditions and the meat becomes tender, falling apart with a fork. More expensive cuts simply don't cook as well, either, and are not worth the money. Good old rump roasts, pork shoulders, and the like are perfect for your crock pot - and your budget! Soups and stews, classic budget-friendly meals, are also a perfect match for your crock pot.

If you consider your crock pot a "miniature oven", you're on your way to understanding why your crock pot will save money on your energy bill. Given that an oven commits about 2500 watts to a meal, while a crock pot only commits about 200 watts, you can see where you would save energy. Even if you consider that you'll be cooking a pot roast in a crock pot for twice as long as in the oven, you're still saving total energy used. Your oven would use 10 kWh to cook a 3 hour pot roast, while your crock pot would use 1.2 kWh to cook the same pot roast for 6 hours. Even roughly estimated, there's no denying the fact that your oven uses a whole lot more energy than your crock pot.

If you are a busy family with children, you know how often you get stuck during that evening rush without dinner plans. Have you called your husband to pick up dinner at the fast food place more than once this week? You know that is a real budget-buster! While you're running your child to piano lessons, or baseball practice, your crock pot can be working away cooking up dinner, saving you from yet another stop of the fast food place. No more frantic calls to the spouse for take out! That's more money saved.

Save Both Time and Money With a Crock Pot - With a larger crock pot, say a 6 quart size, you can put together a big meal, cook it once, and plan to turn the leftovers into several more meals that will last the rest of the week. If you normally buy a lunch out every day, you can also save money by bringing your own home-cooked meal to work. Along with that, you can skip running around for lunch, saving your time for something more important. By cooking more than one meal in the same eight hour period of time, you are also saving energy. Cooking once and eating, two, three, or more times is a big way to save on both time and money.

These arguments for cooking with a crock pot to save both time and money should be sufficient to convince most folks. If that's not enough, consider your sanity. You have a busy family and when everyone is hollering about what's for dinner, you can finally relax and say "look in the crock pot!

Learning slowcooker cooking is easy when you have delicious Slowcooker Recipes to choose from. Pick a recipe and let's get started!