Falling in love

+++ I steered clear of the slow cooker for years. It was of no interest to me. I found the very idea of using a slow cooker about as exciting as boiling water. Slow cooking reminded me of my dear old aunt’s dinner offerings in the 1970s: brown, tasteless, and just plain boring.

So why am I publishing my very own slow cooker recipe book? What has happened? Is this what it has come to? And what next? My best toaster recipes, perhaps?

More than six million slow cookers are sold every year in North America. I constantly receive requests for slow cooker recipes. So I decided to be a little more open-minded, take a closer look, and do some investigating.

We put four slow cookers to use in my test kitchen, and for an entire year my team and I studied the possibilities from every conceivable angle. The advantages of using a slow cooker quickly became clear, and I discovered plenty of useful tricks.

The slow cooker reminds me somewhat of the microwave oven. We were all crazy about it when it first appeared on the market; it was going to revolutionize the way we cooked. There would be no need for conventional ovens anymore because everything could be cooked in the microwave. Well, with time and trials, we realized that such was not the case, especially when it came to dealing with the Christmas turkey. Still, we did not get rid of our microwaves, did we. They are very useful time savers. The same applies to slow cookers.

It is important to me that anything cooked in a slow cooker be as flavourful and appealing as if it had been cooked in a conventional oven. That’s why every recipe in this book is guaranteed to come out just right. They have been tested numerous times and have proved to me that the slow cooker is an ideal cooking tool. +++

RICARDO