Is It Time For You To Start Cooking With A Crock Pot?

There are really two basic reasons folks like to cook with a crock pot, also called a slow cooker. One reason is to save time, the other is to save money. Let’s see if there is any truth to either of those reasons.

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.

Standing over a stove, watching a pot boil, is certainly time wasted. We all know what it’s like to monitor some soup or stew as it simmers on top of the stove, constantly checking its progress. Putting that same soup together in a crock pot, then walking away, frees up hours and hours of your time – time in which you can accomplish another task!

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.

Considering the design of a crock pot, it just makes sense that you are using less energy when you cook with your crock pot for extended periods of time. Take, for instance, cooking a pot roast in your oven. That meal is committing your oven to roughly 2500 watts, whereas that same pot roast in a crock pot would be committing about 200 watts for the same meal. So, a 3 hour oven cooked pot roast would use 10 kWh, while a 6 hour crock pot cooked roast would use about 1.2 kWh. These are rough estimates, but you can see how using a miniature oven, your crock pot, to do extended cooking will save money on your energy bills.

You know what it’s like when you’re in the middle of running kids around and finally break down and call the hubby to pick up something for dinner. You know it’s going to be an expense that you really didn’t have in the budget this week. The evening rush is not the time to start thinking about dinner if you want to save money. When you’re out driving the kids between practices and lessons, your crock pot could be happily bubbling away at home on your kitchen counter. Dinner is ready when you are, and no more money wasted on fast food stops!

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!

Crockpot Recipes that will tempt the taste buds, save money, and save time? That’s certainly reason enough to try your hand at crockpot cooking!