I love my slow cooker. I got it cheap, like $15 bucks stacked in the aisle of the grocery store one day. My favorite thing to do with it is cook a whole turkey breast in it. Then I make turkey soup in it with the left overs. I imagine a single guy like yourself could get multiple meals out of even a small one.

Here's a blog entry describing the whole process, and here's a couple of photos.

I literally just put the defrosted, rinsed turkey breast in the crock pot with a little water. Rub it with some butter if you want. Then I dust it with a bit of pepper, sage, thyme, rosemary, and my secret ingredient: curry powder.

I have never been into using mine. It was actually my husband's before we married. The other day, I decided that I want to start using it, so this is a great post!

This weekend, I threw some cut-up boneless chicken breast in with a jar of spaghetti sauce and let it cook on high for a few hours, until the chicken was cooked through. The result was melt-in-your-mouth delicious. I served it over pasta, with grated cheese on top and homemade bread on the side. Everyone loved it.

Ours is just a small one with no special features.

5-7 quart, oval shape, non-stick, clear lid.

Those with non-stick coatings are fairly easy to clean.

I've become really aggrivated over Rival pots and the "there is no part" for the breaking plastic handles. Just plain bad design to not have the part be replaceable. As a consequence, my next one (I still use the Rivals, with their handles broken) will probably be one of the West Bend Versatility SlowCookers, 84866 or 84846 or 84716 are the current model numbers.

The ideal crockpot probably doesn't exist; a fault of the bottom heating metal pots is that the bottom is hotter than the sides, leading to scorching. The ceramic heating from the side pots are heavy and clumbsy and can't be used elsewhere.

http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Charleys-Slow-Cooker-Mexican-Style-Meat/Detail.aspx

My memory is that this recipe has been de-heated; I use a cup of Tobascco, tablespoons of chili powder and cayenne, and quarter of a head of garlic.

I frequently use five pounds of pork instead, too. When finished, divide into portions and freeze.

Rival makes some really good ones. I've used ours to make chicken stew, roast beef (melt in your mouth tender with potatoes, carrots, onions, and cooked in wine and herbs!), "taco soup" (a kind of chili), and roast lamb and lamb stew.

The nice part of using a crockpot is that you can prep the dish in the cooker's crock the night before and store it in the fridge - then before you go to work the next day, drop the crock in the cooker, set the temp, and forget it until you open the door to the heavenly fragrance of a "done" dinner ready to serve.

The Rivals are wonderfully reliable, they don't take much power, and the crocks are dishwasher safe (hand clean the glass cover, though; the dishwasher chipped ours). The basic three-position (off-low-hi) Rival is a good deal and lasts just short of forever.

There are thousands of recipes from stews and soups to roasts, spaghetti sauces, and even desserts for the slow-cooker. There are dozens of cookbooks and websites that have recipes for the slow-cooker and many recipes can be adapted for it.

Use your imagination and enjoy effortless cooking!

I just read htom's comments. I have to admit, our Rival is probably 10 or more years old and it's never given us trouble. Things change, apparently......

JT

Our much older, smaller, Rivals don't seem to have the breaking handle problem. My guess is that they changed from bakelite to some modern plastic that's cheaper but not as long-term heat-resistant, leading to the failures, which are of a "plastic crumbles" sort.

Mine's a West Bend, not expensive, and easy to use. One thing: Unless you want slightly lumpy soup, buy cheap meat. Expensive cuts will completely disintegrate, but a cheap cut (pork roast, brisket, etc) will hang together just enough, but be nice and tender and juicy.

My wife watches things like HGTV and such, and I've noticed a bunch of ads for a new crockpot. I don't even remember the brand, but my wife said that she wants one for Xmas.

Its schtick is that it has *latches* for the lid. Gave me one of those "why didn't I think of that" moments. About 20% of our use of the things is for office potlucks, birthday parties, etc, where we wind up transporting the thing, with goodies inside. It's always a pain, finding a box to put it in, wrap towels around, don't turn corners too fast and LOOK OUT FOR THAT POTHOLE to keep the lid from sliding off and spilling the sauce, etc all over the car. This thing perfectly solves that problem.

It even comes with a ladle which snaps on the lid.

Just a data point. If all you're going to use it for is home cooking, it's probably not worth the extra money - I'm sure it costs more than one without that feature - but if you haul it around, it might be worth it.

Definitely get a crock pot, Jeff. It is the one gadget in my kitchen that I find indispensable. You can toss some food in it and set it on low before you leave for work. By the time you get home from work, you'll have a home cooked meal ready to go. There's nothing for a single guy quite like coming home and finding the smells of a home cooked meal waiting for you.

Now if I could just find my recipe for spaghetti sauce...

Being a young, single guy I've grown to love my crock pots. I've found I like having two. One 4 quart and one 6 quart. I use the small one most often when cooking for myself, and the large one if I decide to entertain friends. Besides the obvious convenience, I've found that the crock pot is excellent for preparing large quantities of food to freeze for later. Great for shreaded pork, chicken, beef, you name it.
Both Rival and West Bend are good brands.

Uses...
chili,
stew,
beans,
pork tenderloin turned into pulled pork,
roast with potatoes, carrots, and onions,
pork chops w/ cream of mushroom gravy,
potato soup, ...

Tough meats, like roasts turn into mouth melting marvels with just about no effort on your part.

I loved the crock pot while single (and still do) since it was easy cooking several days meals all at once. We have two of them now (his and hers), a large and a small one, and refuse to get rid of either one. The small is nothing fancy: off, lo, hi, automatic (hi at first and turns down to lo). The larger one has a variable heat knob but does about the same as the small one. Both have glass lids.

A couple comments -

1) consider your size requirements. My 6-quart oval is great for doing a whole turkey breast (with bone, cook on a bed of veggies with a can of chicken broth, when cooked strain the now dead veggies out and use the liquid to make stuffing...makes even the premade stuffings kick serious butt.)

But you may prefer a smaller model. Or a larger one, if you have a chest freezer and like to use it. The idea is, every week you cook on the weekend, cooking food for seven days of one meal. Freeze it. Work up to having seven meals in the fridge, with (7+6+5+4+3+2+1) of them (this weeks + last weeks + week before that +...) I also have a Rival 16 Qt Roaster Oven which is great for that. I just don't use it very often.

The last two weekends I made chilli and beef stew, both in the 6-quart oval. Between dinner for my wife and I, and frozen meals, we got about 12 meals out of a day of cooking (the crock pot ran all day, I ignored it). Yes, I do have a chest freezer in the basement, and I use it.

My better half suggests you look at them now, pick out a model you want, and then wait for it to go on sale between now and Christmas. Because it _will_ go on sale.

Oh, and I like the comment above about a crock pot with a latching lid. Excellent for transport. I need to keep my eye open for it.

Most of ours are Rival Crock-Pots (tm) of assorted sizes, but we also have a couple of bottom heaters. We use them a lot. I've posted recipes for everything from applesauce to roast beef (just search on crock) and barely touched our collection, and you should also check out the slow cooker edition of the recipe carnival.

A couple more points - the off-low-high switch is good enough - the first generation with "smart" controls had a catastrophic failure mode. The new base model Rival comes with a lid-holding strap, but when we transport ours we use the same big rubberbands as for holding the bag up in the trashcan.

One of our base-level regulars is almost like Charity's above, only we use salsa. The chicken is tender enough that you can't lift it out of the crock with a fork.

I have a slow cooker but rarely use it. I am a pressure cooker fan.

That said, cooksillustrated.com has a good review of these. (and a 14 day free trial web membership).

I have made stews, roasts and beans in the slow cooker. I find having one with dishwasher safe crock and lids more important than other features.

I do not carry the crock to other places so spillage is not an issue for me.

A ceramic crock seems better to me than the metal ones.

What others said about tough cuts of meat is true, they will hold together and come out tender. This is true for pressure cookers also. The tender cuts are better left to dry roasting, grilling, etc.

I would suggest you get a smaller crock, unless you plan on cooking large amounts for freezing or large groups. Smaller meals in a larger crock do not work as well as in a smaller crock.

Let me toss in another endorsement for Cook's Illustrated. Their recipes are usually accompanied by an essay of 'how did we get here' and 'what works', pitched at relative newbies. Their hardware reviews are quite good.

We use both pressure cookers and crock pot; our first cp did not have a removable crock, and therefore was a pain to wash. I have no idea if such models even exist any more, that was decades ago. But there's not much to go wrong with most of them; barring accident, one you buy today should last a long time.

They're also good for party-sized hot apple cider - not uncommon in New England this time of year!

I am a pressure cooker fan too. I got a Kuhn-Rikon thru Cook's Illustrated for ~$99 and it does the job for stews, beans, thick soups, etc. Any kind of cooking requires prep work (boning, cubing, browning, dicing, u-name-it) before you get to applying heat, so using pressure shortens the cooking time to a minimum, e.g., beans in 12 minutes, beef burgundy in 25 minutes, brown rice in 25, etc.

Don

You've made me want to use my crockpot again soon. I've used it to make a shredded beef recipe I adapted, and I think I used it to make chili with cubes of steak rather than hamburger. I've also made soup in it. Biggest problem was not getting all the little chicken bones out. Gotta work on that aspect. Indeed; I bought some dry barley on the idea it might go in soup to be different, or might be served like rice or bulgar wheat.

FYI--For those with the Rivals that had handles that broke, there's a recall for them. It seems that the handles break *inside* the unit and aren't directly replaceable.

I had this happen to me and I could hear the plastic rattling around inside the bottom unit, so I stopped using it, since I could just imagine that plastic getting on the element and melting.

And, yes, the handles are really cheesy plastic on these models. I see at the CPSC site that people have been burned when the handles broke and they spilled hot food on themselves. Even before the handles broke I thought they were too flimsy and always removed the crock from the base if I had to move the thing.

Lets not forget dips. In a standard round cheap crock pot, cube up a large block of Velveeta. Dump in a can of Ro-tel tomatoes. Run the pot on high until the cheese starts to melt, then turn it to low. Stir occasionally.

Or deer roasts. Marinate the roast in milk overnight, then in the morning rinse it and cook it just like any other piece of lean meat. Lovely.