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What Kinds of Foods Can You Cook in a Crock Pot?
Perhaps you have been out shopping and you have seen this cute little crockpot. You want to try making some different crockpot recipes so you bring it home. Now you are wondering exactly what you can cook in there. Actually, you can use a crockpot for many different types of cooking, including crockpot appetizer recipes, crockpot soups and even crockpot dessert recipes. Making crockpot meals is a simple process.
Meats, Soup and Stews
You can dice up roast and make beef tips with rice, for example. You just need to cut the beef against the grain, cook it for a couple of hours, and make some gravy. You can also make any soup or stew in the slow cooker and crockpot soups come out very nicely. For many crockpot recipes, you simply need to throw the ingredients into the crockpot, stir it, cover it, and leave everything to cook. It really is that easy.
You will not have to wash lots of pots and pans afterwards and a crockpot is much simpler to clean than a pan. Most of the new models are detachable and you can soak them in the sink or put them in the dishwasher safely.
Beans and Spaghetti
A lot of the best crockpot recipes include beans and these come out very nicely in the slow cooker. They will cook slowly without scorching and you can let them cook all day, adding some meat, and the meat flavor will seep into the beans. When the juice thickens, you can enjoy a tasty meal served over rice.
You can prepare spaghetti just like you do on the stove and them simmer it with the meat and sauce in the crockpot to allow the flavors to blend. You can also do this with noodles or rice for great results and a lot of people prefer the flavor of rice, pasta, or noodle based meals, which have been allowed to cook in the slow cooker.
Pretty much anything that can be heated in the oven can be heated in the crockpot. It just takes a bit longer. If you have a casserole that you want to reheat, for example, you might not want to put the oven on if the day is hot. Also, a crockpot uses the same amount of energy as a light bulb so you can save on your electricity bills (or gas bills if you are using a crockpot instead of a gas oven) by slow cooking your food.
