Slow cooker recipes are so easy! All you do is throw two to three ingredients into the cooker, press the on switch and voilà! A delicious home-cooked meal. Of course, all of those steps have to occur 8-10 hours before dinner is to take place, which can be problematic if you start thinking about what you want for dinner an hour or so beforehand. Chances are that you’ll use your slow cooker once, and then never have the foresight to use it again. Here are some mouth-watering slow cooker recipes that you won’t think about until you’re starving and it’s already way too late.
Pulled Pork
It’s Super Bowl Sunday, and you told all your friends last week that you’d be serving your “world famous” pulled pork one hour from now. But really, you just got carried away with excitement about a Pinterest recipe, and have never actually cooked any sort of meat, especially in a slow cooker. The recipe recommends cooking on low for 10-12 hours. Is that the same as putting it on high for 4-5 hours? You are gonna find out, that’s for sure.
- Throw a bottle of barbecue sauce and some ham into the slow cooker.
- Set that sucker to the highest setting.
- Hope for the best.
- Hope isn’t real; throw out that bubbling atrocity.
- Distract guests from absence of pork with football and chips.
- Cry.
Homestyle Beef Stew
This is the perfect dish to cap off a long day on the slopes. Unfortunately, you only reached this conclusion as you walked in the door, cold, exhausted, and famished. Good thing the beef is still uncut and frozen in your freezer!
- Speed defrost hunk of beef in microwave.
- Cut beef into 1-inch pieces with large knife.
- Hurt your hand on the handle. Why is this beef still hard?
- Find that your “speed defrosting” has really just completely cooked the outside, while leaving a frozen solid beef core.
- Slice your finger while trying to cut through said frozen core.
- Attempt to stop the bleeding with a tourniquet made from your slope pass.
- Eat a Snickers bar in the ER.
Moroccan Chickpea Soup
The delicate flavors of this dish only develop when the spices are left to simmer the other ingredients for several hours. But it’s 5 PM on a Tuesday and you’re hungry now. Let’s see if you can’t yank some flavors out of this traditional dish with brute force in 20 minutes.
- Place chickpeas, chopped veggies and chicken stock in the slow cooker.
- Read chickpea package and realize you were supposed to soak them for 12 hours. What?
- Deposit contents of slow cooker in Tupperware “to cook later” (AKA “to slowly rot”).
- Grab any can of soup out of your cupboard.
- Heat in saucepan on stove to make it feel like you cooked something.
- Add some of the Moroccan spices in; feel fancy.
- Realize Moroccan spices don’t jive well with clam chowder.
- Vow to think ahead next time.
- Probably cry.
Tender Beef Brisket
Your family is in town and you’ve insisted on cooking them a meal to show them how self-sufficient you’ve become. You decide to make a brisket, because it sounds mature. You open the cookbook an hour before your family arrives and see the following sentence: “A beef brisket is made tender through hours of cooking at a slow heat.” Once you’ve started simultaneously laughing maniacally and sobbing hysterically, follow these easy steps.
- Go to Ben’s Kosher Deli.
- Buy everything pre-made.
- Accept everyone’s compliments graciously.
- As everyone is leaving, while helping your mother into her coat, look her in the eyes while she tells you that she’s deeply proud of the adult you’ve become.
- Cry and admit everything. Ask for money.
Making a home-cooked meal would be nice, but the slow cooker doesn’t seem to be for you. Keep buying takeout until science invents a fast cooker.
