Crock pot ideas/Recipie

[Kitsune06]

Ok, ok. Ladies? You win. I went and got a crock pot today. I got a big-ish one because ideally.... er... someday... I fully intend to entertain guests etc, and want to be able to feed them decently. Yes, my flair for asian cuisine serves the purpose well, but guests will eventually get sick of my offerings if that's *all* I've got. ...and if I go out riding etc I can eat like a little horse. Where does it all go?!

Anyway. yes. Crock pot.
Hey, Knot, what was that chicken soup recipe that you posted on TD around page 140s or 180s, when you had that awful cold? The one with ginger in it?
I've got a nub of ginger and I'm not sure if I want to use it now or hang on to it but it's getting squooshy like ginger does after awhile....

[BleeckerSt_Girl]

Good for you, Kit!

Crock pots say you shouldn't cook in them unless they are at least halfway full. If you bought a large one (5 qts or more) and you are only one person, you can still make a great recipe and then freeze half of it for you to eat later on, and still have enough to eat 2 nights in a row. My daughter says 3 crockpot meals (hers is 4 qt) feed her and her partner for a whole week.
This is my favorite slowcooker recipe book:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/155...945325-5402446
I like it because it uses so many nice fresh vegetable ingredients and interesting spices. I'm not a vegetarian but I love these fresh healthy recipes and I can add always some chicken or other meat if I want. Avoid the now dated older recipe books you might find in garage sales- the ones that use Cream of MUSH soup and Lipton's dried onion soup mix in every recipe.
Keep us posted on your slowcooker adventures!

[Kitsune06]

...ok, seriously, Cream of Mushroom soup is a staple.
Anything can be cooked with Cream of Mushroom soup.
My dad's best recipe was
1 sweet onion, cut up and sweated in oil until softer
"enough" cream of mushroom soup. (this always changed... basically enough to get a good consistency)
carrots, potatoes, broccoli, peas, etc
1-2c of white wine
and wild game of choice.
This is really, very good with venison tenderloin cut very, very finely, but quartered squirrel, musk rat, chicken (the stuff you can't easily pare off the bones), turtle, turkey, fox snake, gamehen, etc.... work really well as well.
And every meat lends its own flavor. Venison is better with red wines, squirrel with tawny port (lends a sweet taste to it) but don't overdo it, turtle can be difficult but always, ALWAYS worth it, wild turkey, off cuts of venison, squirrel and such are generally best cooked for a very long time, or they can be tough.

Back-country cooking 101.

[chickwhorips]

welcome to the crock side kit.

[Bikingmomof3]

Which one did you choose? As you know I love mine and of course the Fix-It-and-Forget-It books. Not one complaint yet from the family.

[BleeckerSt_Girl]

...ok, seriously, Cream of Mushroom soup is a staple.
Anything can be cooked with Cream of Mushroom soup...
This is really, very good with venison tenderloin cut very, very finely, but quartered squirrel, musk rat, chicken (the stuff you can't easily pare off the bones), turtle, turkey, fox snake, gamehen, etc.... work really well as well.
And every meat lends its own flavor. Venison is better with red wines, squirrel with tawny port (lends a sweet taste to it) but don't overdo it, turtle can be difficult but always, ALWAYS worth it, wild turkey, off cuts of venison, squirrel and such are generally best cooked for a very long time, or they can be tough.

Back-country cooking 101.

True, anything "can" be cooked in canned cream of mushroom soup. But then it pretty much always tastes like canned cream of mushroom soup.

We grew up with Urban Cooking 101...sauteed cockroach in stale beer and stewed rat in Boone's Farm Apple wine reduction. (Roach needs to be cooked a long time to bring out the subtle bouquet of Blag Flag.)
Seriously though- what kind of turtle are you talking here? I have a good snapping turtle cooking story.

[Bikingmomof3]

I have a good snapping turtle cooking story.

Share the story, please?

[Kitsune06]

We grew up with urban cooking 101...sauteed cockroach in stale beer and stewed rat in Boone's Farm Apple wine reduction. (Roach needs to be cooked a long time to bring out the subtle bouquet of Raid.)

Remind me not to eat there!!!

To each her own. I think it's funny how painfully urbane folks will do the organic thing, 'whole foods' and try to seek out hasenfeffer and venison to recall memories of their 'simpler' roots.
How quaint.
You do what you have to. Cattail roots are starchy and not-so-bad in soups etc... just need the right processing, etc. Hard to starve when you live on the lake.
Snappers are generally best b/c of the size but they're dangerous. Soft-shelled, when you can get them, or regular mud turtles are okay, but not enough meat to do much with.
I grew up on the river, born with a cane pole in one hand and net in t' other.
Dad competed in the Buckskinners' Blackpowder Riflery competition (with BP Hawken .50 and handmade buckskin clothes) and we all had fun at the rendezvous on the river every summer. (Think a trapper/trader v. of a ren faire) A nod to a by-gone era, yes, but it gives you an idea of what life was, and how silly and shallow today's best attempts at recreations can be.

[BleeckerSt_Girl]

Share the story, please?

Well we live in the country here, and there are still lots of dairy farms and wildlife around. Plenty of big snapping turtles that love the farm ponds, and they migrate around from pond to pond looking for mates and new places to lay eggs.
My girlfriend had a pond, as did I (before I sold that house) and once a HUGE snapping turtle moved into her pond. It's shell was about a foot and a half long. My friend kept ducks, and I did too, and big snappers are bad news for ducks. Anyway, her husband shot the turtle and they decided to make turtle soup for some guests who were coming the next day for lunch.
My friend read a few turtle soup recipes and proceeded to butcher and clean the meat from the turtle. She later said she would never do it again, because it was so much messy yucky work for so little meat. But she is tough. Anyway, she finally got all the meat cleaned and cut into cubes and she put a little marinade on it and put it in a bowl in the fridge overnight to make the soup with the next day. They cleaned the giant shell, which they actually used that Halloween for their toddler's costume as Mutant Ninja Turtle, with the top half of the shell strapped on his back.
So...the next morning my friend took the bowl of cubed turtle meat out of the fridge in order to make the soup. To her horror, she saw that the meat cubes were TWITCHING ABOUT in the bowl!!!! Apparently some sort of electrical residual energy, like the way frogs legs can twitch after death. She said it was really really GROSS. But by that time she had all the other ingredients ready to go and so she just dumped the meat into the hot soup and that was that. The soup turned out delicious and her guests were mighty impressed. Her son had a tiny 1" baby snapper he had found the day before, and they put it in a pretty Japanese bowl to swim about on the dining table as a centerpiece while they had the soup (they later let the baby go free).

I have my own giant snapper stories and experiences as well (i'm known as the snapper wrassler around here), but I never had the urge to cook one.

[Kitsune06]

Snakes do the same thing. It's good to skin them and put them in salt water to soak a little, negates the inherent sorta fishy flavor to them, but they writhe in really gross ways, even after death. ech.

The nice thing about them, though, is when you fry them or whatever, the ribs stay attached to the spinal column unlike fish. Score.

[BleeckerSt_Girl]

To each her own. I think it's funny how painfully urbane folks will do the organic thing, 'whole foods' and try to seek out hasenfeffer and venison to recall memories of their 'simpler' roots.

It's true. Then again, I think most people when they reach their 40's and 50's get certain yearnings to connect with things from their childhood- comfort food, music they recall fondly, even old fashions in clothes. It might even be things that they envision might have been part of their past or their grandparents' past, without actually having lived it themselves. It's a comfort to feel connected to the past in some way. When I was 15-25 I was busy trying to put as much distance as I could between me and any older generations. Now I find it fascinating and enjoyable to explore the old and the new and find interesting or pleasing ways to combine them.

Now that I am in my 50's I am finally realizing that I am NOT going to live forever, and there are hints of ailments and other people my age are getting heart attacks and cancer and such. Friends have died, parents and a brother have died. It starts to hit home then, and yes, DH and I are trying our best to eat in a healthier way and improve our odds. Eating more fresh fruit and veggies, trying to find some that have not been sprayed, eating less meat, less fried stuff, etc. God knows I have to try to make up for all the years of abuse I put my body through during my life.
To tie all this in with crockpots- crockpots came along in the early 1970's. I was about 20 and I got a crockpot at that time. I vaguely recall that everything I made in it seemed to be a mushy bland creamy mess. All the recipes at the time seemed to call for nothing but over-processed canned, dried, or frozen ingredients. Canned spinach, canned mushrooms (is it so hard to slice mushrooms?), canned chicken(!), Velveeta processed "cheese food". This was when it was hard to get any bread except white bread in the store, remember. Recently I was thinking that perhaps my memory was biased and I wasn't remembering it right. But then I looked at my DH's mothers' recipe collection fromthat era, and also got hold of a 1967 Woman's Day magazine and was appalled at the horrendously awful recipes in it. It tasted bad to me then, and tastes bad to me now. To be fair- there were no recipes for venison there. That might have been good.
Hey, I have my junk food moments, believe me! And sometimes when I am sick I HAVE to have Campbell's tomato soup, just like my mother would make for me when I was little and sick. A comfort. But overall, I am trying to stay healthy for as long as I can, and for me that means eating more fresh food, more produce and whole grains, food with less additives & preservatives, less fat, etc. And excercising by walking and biking- for the first time in my life!

[Kitsune06]

the 50's-70's were where we were going "Oh! Look! We can make these things! We can make butter with oil and preserve x, y, and z indefinitely! Ha! Take that, Boris! And look- everything's so much easier to ship etc when it has prolonged shelf life etc! (insert much more involved economic and political motivations here)"

But artificial food is generally bad for the body. White flour is bad for the intestines, pure sugar hellish on the blood sugar levels, etc etc. At this point in time, yes, these things were in stores, but if you were backwoods enough or poor enough, still a lot of your food came from the garden, etc.

it's now, after modernizing research into healthcare, dietary health and for some, related to the increasing knowledge of our own mortality, that we as a whole are at least more conscious of wiser dietary decisions; whether or not we really adhere to this knowledge.

Diet is a lifestyle, not a temporary change.

...but convenience still needs to factor in for some.

[KnottedYet]

Kit, I don't remember my chicken and ginger recipe. I just throw things together and if it turns out good I report back to TE.

I'm guessing it was a chicken carcass, a thumb of sliced ginger, a head of garlic (cloves left whole) some sliced veges, and either potatoes or rice to thicken it up a bit.

I have a chicken carcass right now, and 2 lbs of mushrooms. Gotta set up the cp tomorrow morning. I'm thinking of adding some carrots and maybe frozen corn or somthing. Whatever is in the freezer. Maybe no rice or potato in this one. Probably some rosemary. I dunno. We'll see.

[mtbdarby]

Lisa, I'm gonna make your black bean soup tomorrow for after tubing (and before margaritas!). I've never used cilantro before **gasp** and bought a bunch of fresh stuff. I only got 2 cans of beans since there's just 2 of us. How much cilantro should I put in there? I assume you chop it up first? Thanks!

[BleeckerSt_Girl]

Lisa, I'm gonna make your black bean soup tomorrow for after tubing (and before margaritas!). I've never used cilantro before **gasp** and bought a bunch of fresh stuff. I only got 2 cans of beans since there's just 2 of us. How much cilantro should I put in there? I assume you chop it up first? Thanks!

Are the cans the larger Progresso bean cans? Otherwise if they are "regular" sized cans you might want to downsize some of the other ingredients because it's not going to be a very big soup with only 2 little cans of beans, unless those are the slightly larger Progresso brand cans.

I would chop up about a good fistful of cilantro and throw it in with the soup when you start cooking. (Cut off and discard the thicker stems) That cilantro is going to add it's flavor over the hours of cooking, but it won't be pretty and green at the end, it'll just be sort of cooked in and not noticable. So at the last 30 minutes or so I would throw in another 1/2 cup or so of chopped cilantro so it will be pretty and green in the soup. If you like the cilantro taste, then top the soup with a dollop of sour cream and a bit more chopped cilantro. If not, then a bit of chopped raw onion and sour cream is good on top.

If you've never had cilantro before- you might want to tast it first and decide if you want to use a slightly smaller amount the first time. We have grown to love it and can never put "too much" in.
Let us know how it comes out!

Knot- I love that about crockpot cooking- most of the time you can put whatever veggies you have on hand in there with a bit of liquid and maybe some meat if you have it and somehow it "usually" comes out great 6-8 hours later.