One of my recent domestic chores of late has been trying to get myself set up for slower cooker food preparation. I’ve got plenty of good stovetop recipes that could probably be converted into slow cooker recipes, but I’m also trying to expand my game a bit, mix some variety in, by finding some new recipes I can set up in my crock-pot before work so they’re ready by the time I get home. I want to try my hand at different stuff rather than cycling through the same dozen recipes all the time, but I often don’t have the energy to cook every night or to prepare some kind of big, week-of-leftovers type meal on the weekends, so I’m hoping the convenience of a slow cooker will let me do that without delaying my dinner later than it usually is these days. The problem is, I didn’t grow up in a household that used a slow cooker, so I have zero experience cooking with one other than the pot roast I made for my birthday back in 2024, right before the crock of my crock-pot fell off my kitchen counter and shattered on the floor. I get the basics of course, it’s all there in the generic name (slow cooker), but I also know enough to know that very little water is lost during cooking and that the length of cooking means that various seasonings tend to be extra effective. Since my usual method for seasoning things is by smell, I can’t rely on that for any slow cooker meals since you’re not supposed to uncover it while it’s cooking, it’ll ideally be cooking while I’m at work, and the thin scent of food in a slow cooker doesn’t compare to getting a face full of steam from whatever you’re preparing on the stovetop or in the oven.

Trying to find information online isn’t helping the matter. While I’ve been able to find a degree of consistency in all of the guides that offer to teach you how to convert a stovetop or oven recipe into a slow cooker recipe, the actual methods for changing how you prepare the dishes are incredibly inconsistent. This will likely involve a signigicant amount of experimentation in the future, but the volume of the food I’d prepare in my crock-pot means that I’ll be eating any mistakes for a while since it’s not like I’m going to waste the food I made. Sure, I will probably be able to do a little bit of stove-top rescuing when I reheat the food, but only if I mess it up enough that I need to fix it but not so badly that it’s impossible to salvage. I’m not too keen on the idea of making extra work for myself, though. I’m trying to decrease the amount of work I’ve got to do in the first place, so giving myself more work in order to eat the leftover food each night would defeat the purpose entirely. Ideally, I’d be able to find a reliable guide that is well-reviewed or recommended by someone whose taste I trust, but most of the people whose taste I trust don’t do a lot of slow cooking outside of the rare thing that needs to stay warm like cheese for nachos or some kind of party dip. It won’t hurt to ask, of course, but I’m not sure I’m going to get the kind of relaible information I want. Too bad slow cookers didn’t have the surge in popularity that instant pots did. I want my food to be done at the end of a long work day, not something I need to finish slapping together and then wait (a short time, to my understanding) on to eat. I want to return home to a heavenly aroma that I can immediately dig into.

Looking for good recipes is a bit of a hurdle as well these days. There’s tons of them out there, but so many new cooking sites have cropped up in the last two years that my old trusted sites are more and more difficult to find if I search a type of recipe online. I don’t really want to waste my time on any of the new sites, either, since so many of them are likely showing up at the top of the search results because of SEO manipulation are full of LLM-generated garbage. I’m not worried about posioning myself or anything like that since I know enough about cooking in general to spot bad directions or undercooked meat a mile away, but I don’t want to waste my time skimming through a recipe with only two reviews that comes with some suspicious-looking photos next to the link in order to figure out how much of it was generated and what, if anything, was created by an actual person. I just want to find interesting suggestions for doing pork in a slow cooker that aren’t some form of pulled pork. Or potatoes that isn’t soup or roasted potatoes. Or really any kind of food that isn’t a form of soup and that doesn’t take extra steps at the start or end of the process (farewell to this potential avenue to French onion soup). I don’t have anything against soups, mind you, I just want a little more variety in my meals than endless soups would provide. I need different textures and eating methods too, not just flavors!

I might try going to the bookstore and browsing around for books of slow cooker recipes. I bet they exist. I’d be incredibly surprised if they didn’t, to be honest. I’ll probably need to hit up a used bookstore for those, though, since I don’t trust any modern cookbooks to not be slapped together with some amount of LLM involved. I doubt the plagiarism machine has been kept to only the internet, given how long it has been out and how many factually incorrect mushroom identification books I’ve heard about exist in the world. I’m not about to trust a predictive text machine with my gastro-intestinal well-being. I barely even trust me with it, these days, thanks to the loosening of regulations and how, despite that, outbreaks of foodborne illness have been happening more often lately despite there being less federal reporting of those things than ever. Which is another wrinkle I need to account for in my cooking. I need to make sure everything gets hot enough to kill any bacteria that might have snuck its way in via my food. I already had what I suspect was E. Coli poisoning once this year, I don’t need it again. What a world to live in…