• March 28, 2024

Slow Cooker Top 10

I am currently having a love affair with my crockpot. I have to admit that for many years I fought embracing the slow cooker craze ,because it just felt old school 1960s housewife to me. However, now that I started to explore the time release food craze, I have to admit that I am a believer. Sure, I have had some pretty epic failures, like a few weeks ago when I tried to make bread in the mechanism. However, in general it is in my opinion, one of the greatest kitchen inventions the world has ever seen.

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Old Faithful…The Slow Cooker I have had forever!

 

Now for the top 10 reasons I love my crockpot:

 

  1. I can walk away without setting the house on fire.
  2. I can come home to a house that smells like a heavenly Grandmother made home cooked meal.
  3. It is the queen of making comfort food…stew, soup, mac n cheese, roasts, etc.
  4. It is almost like having a personal chef without the expense.
  5. It allows me to entertain, without spending my entire party in the kitchen, away from my guests.
  6. It is one of the most fool proof and resilient cooking utensils around. If you are one of those, “I can only boil water chefs”, the crockpot should be your new best friend.
  7. It can create dinner in one pot, so my kitchen does not look like a hurricane hit it after dinner preparations.
  8. I can cook in the crock pot, while I sleep, and I can wake up to heavenly smells, and they sometimes even permeate my dreams, if I am lucky
  9. You can over-cook something in the crockpot and normally still be ok
  10. The way it can make my house smell, did I mention the smells?

 

So the crockpot as we know it today is truly an invention of the 1970’s, and yes, it did come in avocado. Hell, all of the kitchen appliances of the 1970’s had an avocado model, right?

 

The slow cooker was first patented by an Irving Naxon ,in 1936, He designed and developed the Naxon Beanery, based on a kitchen tool used by his mother, Tamara Kaslovski Nachumsohn. She grew up making cholent, in Lithuania, which would sit in a crock in the oven all day and cook. Naxon remembered the story and took the pot and added a heating element, in order to make beans, which could cook all day.

 

Rival Manufacturing bought the Naxon Beanery and re-branded it the Crock Pot. and the rest was history. It was recognized during both the oil and energy crises of the 70’s, because it was energy efficient, using about as much energy as a lightbulb. During its heyday (1975) there were 3.7 million crock pots sold in one year. However, it has seen highs and lows in sales since that point, because additional kitchen accouterments, such as microwave ovens, hit the market.

 

In today’s kitchen, the slow cooker is still a must have in over 86% of the kitchens. And in my kitchen, right now, it is my favorite kitchen appliance; actually my house is being permeated with the smell of baked potato soup right now, as I write. Cheers!

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