Furthermore, during the holiday season, using a crockpot for family meals leaves you many desirable hours free, to bake up a storm, create fancy, freezable appetizers for parties and make a few trays of fudge!

Cooking with a crockpot is quite flexible. Maybe your recipe calls for a few carrots, but you’re out. You do have some celery stalks and a few florets of broccoli. So you can pretty much swap ingredients as your frig dictates. Use up last nights veggie leftovers. You’ll save lots of money and create some tasty new recipes on the fly. Do consult a seasoning book for good matches for your meat.

There are few ‘rules’ attached to crockpot recipes which you need to know.

1.Your chopped veggies go in first. You want to create a ‘bed’ upon which the meat sits. Set the seasoned meat on top of the veggies, which should cover at least 2 inches deep of the bottom of the crockpot.

2.Pour hot water, or the broth of your choice, over the veggies. The meat should not sit in the water or broth.

3.Once the lid is on, don’t take it off! If there’s one disadvantage to my favorite appliance, it’s that it loses significant amounts of heat if you remove the lid during cooking, which adds an unspecified amount of time to what the recipe calls for – the crockpot may take up to an hour to reheat to the temperature it was before you removed the lid. However, the up side here is that you really have no reason to remove the lid.

4.If you plan to be away from home, it’s best to plug the crockpot into a power surge protector strip, which will automatically shut the appliance off should an electrical problem come into play.

If you’re a novice with crockpots, follow instructions given in the crockpot recipes to the letter. Once you see how easy it is and experience the delicious results and understand the basics, you’ll soon be an expert, with your own crockpot recipes, saving time and money!

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