The recipes in this book were created for use in today’s world—with an emphasis on making as much of that food as possible using a slow cooker.
The slow cooker makes it possible for you to prepare great-tasting food in ways that save you time and effort. Take a quick look at this book and you’ll see that there are recipes for food that can take you from breakfast to lunch to dinner, and through all points in between.
While every effort was made to create foolproof recipes for this book, it’s impossible to anticipate every factor that can affect cooking times. For example, a slow cooker sitting on a kitchen counter next to a drafty window on a sub-zero, windy winter day is going to take longer to come to temperature than one sitting in direct sunlight in the summer. Regardless of the cooking method, ingredients at room temperature will cook faster than those just out of the refrigerator, and even faster than those fresh from the freezer.
Convenience isn’t a constant either. A slow cooker isn’t conducive to making a meal in a hurry. On the other hand, the oven isn’t always practical in the summer, and, when there are other chores to be done around or away from the house, the stovetop certainly isn’t practical even for the most organized master at multitasking. Different methods will suit your needs at different times. But when you plan ahead and allow for the extra cooking time that a slow cooker requires, it lets you avoid adding heat to the kitchen from using the oven and the necessity of standing over (or at least staying close by) the stove to keep an eye on various pots and pans.
Just like when you fix something using any other cooking method, adapting a recipe for the slow cooker doesn’t mean that there is only one correct way to fix each dish. For that reason, this book also includes sidebars that have bonus recipes, tips, and suggestions on how to alter some of the recipes.
Last, but not least, it is also worth noting that the exact measurement for salt is seldom given in this book. The author prefers to add as little white sea salt as possible during the cooking process, and then have gray sea salt available at the table to season the food. (It’s no coincidence that the author also wrote The Everything® Low-Salt Cookbook.) Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, when a recipe calls for salt, sea salt was used to test the recipe.