Tuesday, December 31, 2013

I'm back... with more slow cooker fun

Santa was very good to me this year, and brought me a bunch of different cookbooks for the holidays.

Since I'm back at work full time and living in yet another apartment on the east coast, I'm going to be using a lot of the slow cooker recipes - which I am trying from Cooking Light's "Slow Cooker Tonight" cookbook. I tried to select recipes with an 8 hour cooking time or thereabouts so that I can start to use it once a week while I'm at work.

For New Year's Eve, I thought I would kick it off with my first choice from the book, Beef Burgundy with Egg Noodles.

It was a snap to make - prep time took maybe all of 10 minutes max, and the apartment smelled heavenly all afternoon. It seemed to have cooked in less time than the 8 hours on "low" setting called for, but a pretty good recipe nonetheless.

Link is here if you want to find it online:
http://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/beef-burgundy-egg-noodles-50400000124208/

I used Beringer's White Zinfandel for the wine, and Angus stew beef. When the beef was done, it literally fell apart and everything else was so flavorful and very good.  I think the Angus made a big difference in the flavor, and it also probably helped that the entire thing was stewing in wine all afternoon :-)

It's one of the perfect winter stews, I think. Best part about it was, entire family loved it - got a solid 3 thumbs up from all of us so it's made my "make this again" list.

I've started by marking the slow cooker cookbook with post-it flags - blue are for recipes I've yet to try. When I find one we like, I'll mark it again with a red flag so that we know this is a good go-to recipe for the future.

I am also going to be following the food lover's 12 healthy habits cookbook and plan on incorporating two of those healthy habits in January - I will let you know what they are and how they are progressing as we go.

The only thing I have to decide now is what to make  for next week's crockpot meal. What would you choose?

Char Siu Pork Roast (Chinese BBQ pork shredded and served over veggie stir fry and rice)

Sauerbraten (which I haven't had in YEARS - my family used to go to the Triangle Hofbrau on Route 23 in Wayne, NJ for that and I believe the Hofbrau has been closed for a long time).

Potato-cheddar soup with homemade bread

or something not listed here - I want to give chicken a break for awhile as we've been chicken'd to death lately. I may also break out into some seafood in January as that's one of the healthy habits we all need to incorporate. Til next time (and hopefully I can keep up with the blog this time around, and I promise to make every effort to do so).