Reddit reviews Slow Cooker Revolution Volume 2: The Easy-Prep Edition: 200 All-New, Ground-Breaking Recipes

Hey OP, I had the EXACT same problems you have. I'm going to tell you the truth about cooking and /r/cooking:

1. The shorter the cook time, the worse the meal is going to taste, or the unhealthier it will be. It's a trade-off.
   
   
2. A slow-cooker is fantastic. I'm just past the point you are at, and this is the ideal book to get. Check your library and see if they have it. Basically, America's Test Kitchen is an organization that tries out lots of recipes and sees what is actually good. They put out a lot of cookbooks. Their first one, for slow cookers, took too much prep work so they put out a second book, where it actually is less than 15 minutes a meal.
   
   
3. The sweet spot in terms of prep time vs result comes from MASS cooking. You can cook healthy, pretty tasty meals, BUT you'll have to cook in batches (ie making 3 meals at once, and eating them over the next few days). This is how you get the time down. For example, right now I'm cooking some pork that is going to be come shredded pork. It's in my slow cooker. I didn't just make 1 serving, though, I made like 5. The rest goes in the fridge and I eat it over the next 3-4 days. This requires more planning but it's how to solve your issue and really invest very little time per meal. Downside is you have to reheat the meals you make.
   
   
4. /r/cooking is full of hardcore people. These people cook professionally or as their main hobby. The idea of spending an hour to cook a meal is very normal for them. Half an hour seems short to them. This is obviously not very realistic for the average person - when I come home from a hard day's work, I do NOT want to spend 30+ minutes cooking. I want something fast. /r/cooking DOES NOT AND NEVER WILL UNDERSTAND THIS CONCEPT. That's because everyone here is very into cooking, and insists on 1+ hour cook-a-thons. You're therefore not really going to get much support and help - the idea of someone who just wants a decent tasting, healthy meal with less than 10 minutes of prep time is beyond their comprehension - they don't understand people who don't want to invest the same time they do into cooking. This happens in pretty much every hobby subreddit, and it happens here as well.
   
   
5. Visit /r/mealprep. It's all about cooking meals ahead of time.
   
   I went through the same thing you did. Was told it was easy and cheap and quick to create great tasting, healthy meals, had no idea what I was doing, came here for help and was told "If you aren't putting in 1hr+, you're not even trying! Get serious!" and was extremely discouraged. Luckily I found other ways around, specifically with regards to mass cooking and using the slow cooker.
   
   PS You know what many professional chefs eat when they come home from a long shift at the restaurant? Take-out. Because like us, they have busy lives and don't have time to sit down and spend 30+ minutes cooking their dinner.

Again, no. A slow cooker is a way of cooking stuff long and low. A pressure cooker is a way of increasing the boiling point of water so that things cook hotter. But you can't just take recipe X made for "normal" cooking and put it in a pressure cooker to make it cook faster or put it in a slow cooker to make it cook slower. Well, you can, but it will not turn out good in either case.

Get America's Test Kitchen's books Slow Cooker Revolution (the second edition is lighter on prep work) and Pressure Cooker Perfection and see for yourself how the two aren't simply interchangeable by changing the amount of time you cook something.

I heard the first one is a little heavy on prep work. I have volume 2, and the recipes are pretty easy, but good. there's a vegetarian chapter, and a few vegetarian recipes scattered through the other chapters.

http://www.amazon.com/Slow-Cooker-Revolution-Volume-2/dp/1936493578

There's a really dope Cooks Illustrated book "Slow Cooker Revolution 2: the Easy-Prep Edition". A lot of these do require some quick prep in the microwave or the skillet, but there are probably a few in there with no prep required at all.

"The test cooks at America's Test Kitchen have worked their magic again, developing and perfecting an all-new collection of 200 slow-cooker recipes. With this volume, we looked at this must-have appliance in new ways to truly maximize its potential. You'll learn how to make a host of dishes like Garlicky Shrimp, Chicken Soft Tacos, and Flourless Chocolate Cake--recipes you'd never expect to see coming out of a slow cooker. The moist heat of the slow cooker is tailor-made to serve up flavorful stews, chilis, and braises (and don't worry--we've included a good number of these), but with our smart strategies and clever ingredient selections, we were also able to pull off spice-rubbed roast chicken, ziti with meaty ragu, rare roast beef, poached salmon and even cheesecake."
https://www.amazon.com/Slow-Cooker-Revolution-2-Easy-Prep/dp/1936493578/

Hey, I think I am in a similar boat as you. My SO and I live rather busy lives and we do not have that much time for cooking. The spare time we do have, we would rather spend it doing things other than cooking.


I have to say the slow cooker has been a very practical tool for us as it lets us do large portions of dishes that are to our specs. (I don't think of us as very health conscious, but she does not like salty food and neither of us likes unneeded fat, so making our own interesting meals has been great).


If you are starting, I think a copy of America's Test Kitchen: Slow Cooker Revolution Vol 2: Easy Prep Edition. is a great resource. I really like this one in particular because most of the recipes in this book taste great and they are rather easy to make. Vol 1. is good and has more recipes, but the recipes are more involved. I have found other cookbooks and most websites to be very hit or miss when it comes to slow-cooked meals. The slow-cooker has a tendency to make stuff bland if you are not careful. So you have to pay close attention to the amount of spices, aromatics and how long you leave stuff in there. It will overcook and not taste great if left too long.

If you are already doing most of your cooking at home, I do not think you will save that much money at the grocery. (Unless you are buying frozen prepared stuff, in that case yes, you will quite a bit.) If anything it will go up a bit at the beginning as you will need to get some extra spices.

Another thing you might want to think about is getting a bunch of smallish tupperware that holds ~2 servings of whatever you cook. One of the good or bad things about cooking with the slow cooker is that you will end up with a lot of servings of one food, and you will get bored of it after a couple of days. Having these small tupperwares makes it practical to store some in the freezer and be able to thaw only the amount you want when you are no longer bored of that.

What we end up doing is cook one day a week, usually on the weekend. We cook one or two large things in the slow cooker and then store them. During the week we just reheat them (or leftovers from a previous week) with some frozen veggies and rice and eat like kings. Seriously, if you follow the recipes from the cookbook I mentioned, they come out really well. We actually don't enjoy that much eating out anymore because our food tastes better. (we do like the no clean-up plus service that you get at a restaurant though)

I've been searching for these sorts of recipes recently too. So far my favourite i've tried from reddit is this Afghan Chickpea Recipe (ignore the unappetizing photo, it tastes much better than it looks).

Apart from that the most success i've had is from the America Test Kitchen Slow Cooker books which aren't focused on veg recipes but they have a bunch in there, and i can pretty much count on them being quality. Here's the ones i use:

• Slow Cooker Revolution
  
• Slow Cooker Revolution Vol. 2
  
• Healthy Slow Cooker Revolution
  
  The recipes i've tried are the Turkish Eggplant Casserole, Spanish Lentil Stew, and Veg Indian Curry, all pretty tasty.

Big fan of Seriouseats.com and I have The Test Lab cookbook but haven't cooked anything out of it yet :(. I also checkout http://www.budgetbytes.com/, http://www.thekitchn.com/, http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/ and Alton Brown recipes.

We have 3 (boy was I wrong) 5 America's Test Kitchen cookbooks:

• The Make Ahead Cook
  
• Cooking School
  
• Slow Cooker Revolution
  
• Slow Cooker Revolution 2
  
• Six-Ingredient Solution
  
  These get used frequently.

My wife makes freeze ahead slow cooked meals out of:

http://www.amazon.com/Slow-Cooker-Revolution-Volume-2/dp/1936493578/ref=pd_sim_b_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=0BA51WJNVCMJPP319VNE

Simply the best crockpot meals I've ever had. Really changes the way that I think about slow cooked meals, and has opened up their potential. If you are dedicated slow cooker, these are worth taking a look at.

It might be worth it to get this book

http://www.amazon.com/Slow-Cooker-Revolution-2-Easy-Prep/dp/1936493578

or check it out from a library. Lots of well tested, relatively simple slow cooker recipes.