My history with Slow Cooking

  I became interested in slow cooking shortly after getting married. I married on the younger end of the age spectrum, I was 24. I met my partner in 2012. He had two growing boys already and within the first year of marriage our family was already expanding as we became pregnant with our first child. We were large on family short on money but filled with all the love in the world. At this time my husband worked, and I stayed at home. Already I had been interested in cooking and had attended a technical school for culinary arts. At school, however, we always had the right ingredients in the right amounts available. Now as a young mother, I was trying to balance meals without unlimited access to ingredients. I also lived in a desert and I quickly realized how hot my house was getting each evening when I had the oven on trying to roll out meals. Of course there was also the electric bill that was climbing. Prior to marriage, my partner had primarily made frozen tv dinners. I wanted to make more healthy meals – especially since I was pregnant – while also keeping the food bill low and hopefully lowering the electric. I started to research and learned that slow cookers are a reliable cooking method and that they can help save money. For starters they don’t heat the house the way that the oven dose, so the ac doesn’t work as hard. They, also in and of themselves, use less electricity than the oven. This is good for the nation’s grid and good for an individual’s wallet. I feel like they can save time if used appropriately. For example, an individual who works can make a meal that is long cooking early in the morning, maybe even planning a side dish the night before like biscuits, or else cooking dry beans to use the next morning. Then the meal can be cooked and will need very little effort when the individual comes home. As a pregnant person and a new stepmom, I found that crockpots let me have hot meals cooking and ready, so my evening was free to spend with the kids and with my husband. I also found that I could make simple or complex meals. I also learned that I could cook with traditionally less desired meats and other inexpensive ingredients because the long time in the slow cooker was just what these ingredients needed in order to reach their peak flavor. Over the course of time, I learned how to bake in the crockpot and have learned to bake many of my favorite baked goods in the crockpot.