brazilian feijoada
I have been looking for recipes to make for dinner with my slow cooker, and went straight to Mel's Kitchen Cafe. The slow cooker section has quite a few options, including the Slow Cooker Turkey with No Fuss Gravy that I made - wow! - two years ago, and which I will soon be revisiting.
This turned out pretty good. I left it on too long though. Oh well.
Anyway, I picked out this Brazilian Faijoada because I have a bunch of pork butt from my last Costco run, and because I love beans. The recipe seemed simple enough, though I do not generally prefer the multi-step, brown it first slow cooker recipes. For this particular recipe, I only used pork butt, no beef ribs. I also used some of my homemade pork broth instead of chicken broth. I used the specific batch of broth that I didn't want to drink straight. Also, the chicken broth I made last weekend ended up being left out over night, so I had to toss it T_T
I feel really good being back in the kitchen. I don't know why, but something about the Plated and Blue Apron services just put me off. I ended up refusing to cook those meals, and DH had to do all the work. They were tasty enough I suppose, but something about it just didn't appeal to me. I wonder if it's some kind of control issue of not being able to choose exactly what I get to make and eat. I think another part is that, despite what a challenge it can be, finding new recipes to try is actually pretty fun for me.
It's really funny because I have gone through several iterations of the slow cooker, each time attempting to make it my primary cooking device. I just adore the idea of the slow cooker. Throw everything in a pot and a great meal is ready in a few hours without heating up the apartment (in the summer) or having to stand over it? Yes please.
I think this time might be the winner for a couple reasons. First, my other slow cookers were basic models, so I had trouble with timing and food drying out. Often I would be gone for work for 10 hours a day, but the food would be done after only 8 hours. The basic models would just continue to cook until they were manually switched to warm. This model has a timer, so it will switch to warm after whatever time is set. This won't 100% prevent drying out, but it will help. I will also choose recipes better suited for being left in the cooker for longer periods.
Second, I could never get the right size. My first slow cooker was 6 quarts, which meant I had to make a lot of food in order for it to work properly. That meant if I didn't like it, I was either stuck eating it for a while, or I had to throw a lot of food away. My most recent slow cooker was 4 quarts, which was fine most of the time, but sometimes I would struggle to fit a recipe into it and it would end up overflowing. Obviously that's user error, but it was a problem because sometimes I wanted to make the larger recipes and sometimes I only needed the smaller size.
This Crock-Pot is perfect because I have both the sizes I would need for pretty much any recipe (that I would choose for the two of us). I'm not sure I'll ever use the split crock, but I like having it just in case. It would be great for dips for a party, but we don't host very often. I suppose it would also be good for fondue.