» Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Recipes for Two: For the Small Slow Cooker

Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Recipes for Two: For the Small Slow Cooker Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: Slow Cooking NOT at its best.
Comment: I was expecting classic meals when I purchased this book, or atleast "normal" entrees that I could feed my boyfriend. All the recipes are pretty contemporary, and I guess I didn't take the title "NOT Your Mother's Slow Cooker Recipes" seriously enough.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Really expands the way I use my slow cooker
Comment: I found this book at the library and had success with enough recipes to convince me that I wanted to buy it. For me, the appeal of this book that there is quite a variety of recipes included and most of them are not recipes that are "traditional" crock pot cooking (i.e. huge beef roast + envelope of soup mix + cup of coffee = enough goopy grey beef to feed an army). I've tried comfort favorites like the macaroni & cheese and lasagna, as well as the thai red curry chicken and the teriyaki. Yes, I think the traditional stove/oven preparation methods do yield better results, but not my much. And I can throw these recipes together before I haul the kids to piano or dance lessons, and dinner is ready when we get home. I look forward to trying the risotto this week!

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Won't be using it that much....
Comment: Most recipes call for too many ingredients (herbs and spices are ingredients to me).
The lack of photos is also a turn off.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: wonderful cookbook-a must buy
Comment: I checked this book out of the library, and I knew I had to own a copy. The recipes are different and delicious. I purchased a used copy, although you would never know it. It arrived promptly and in pristine condition.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Comment: I was enthusiastic about trying some of the recipes in this book as I was single at the time I purchased it to complement my 3 and 1/2 quart slow cooker and was looking for a convenient way to cook for one or two people that would not compromise the quality of home cooked meals. My enthusiasm quickly turned to dismay. First, most of these recipes are A LOT of work. And I am a self-confessed foodie who has spent many happy hours in the kitchen, so I can only imagine how annoying and overwhelming these recipes would be for a novice. Most of these recipes require meat to be browned and vegetables sauted in advance. In other words, you have to cook it before you cook it. C'mon if you wanted to do all that, you wouldn't be using a slow cooker! The worst thing about these recipes is that after all that work, most of the recipes I tried were just average and one or two of them downright sucked. The extra work would be worth it if the recipes turned out great, but, I'm sorry to say, most of these recipes are a lot more trouble than they are worth.

I used the brand of slow cooker the author recommended and followed the recipe and it still didn't turn out right. There is a recipe for macaroni and cheese which recommends adding evaporated milk at the start, and the milk curdled during cooking. So I ended up with macaroni and cheese scrambled eggs. Yuck! The recommendations for cooking oatmeal overnight in your slow cooker were totally off. I mean, there is a guide in there for converting stove top recipes to slow cooker recipes and according to that the oatmeal should have been done after three hours, which it was. So the idea that you can turn it on at night and have it ready for breakfast in the morning is nice, but not quite accurate, unless you go to bed at midnight and get up at three. If you have a programmable cooker, it will automatically switch to the warm setting after cooking time, but then you'll end up with pasty, burned-tasting oatmeal.

Another thing I found counterproductive is that most of these recipes are designed to make enough for left-overs. If you like eating left-overs, I guess it could be a good thing. I just thought the point of this book was cooking for two, not three or four.

If I remember correctly, most of these recipes could be done in 2 and 1/2 or three hours. This timing didn't work for me because I needed to leave the cooker on while I was out most of the day, and I didn't have a programmable cooker that would automatically switch to warm. Even if I had one, I don't think I would have liked eating food that had been sitting in the cooker for several hours.

I thought the purpose of using a slow cooker was to be able to make a healthy home-cooked meal without spending a lot of time in the kitchen. This author seems to have forgotten that. If you are looking for recipes that you can leave in the cooker while you are at work all day, or you are one of those people who just doesn't like to cook, I wouldn't recommend this book.

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