Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook

`Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook' by expert bread cookbook author Beth Hensperger and Julie Kaufmann is hands down the very best book on its subject you are likely to find. It is easily twice the size of my former slow cooker favorite, Judith Finlayson's `The 150 best Slow Cooker recipes' and easily more than twice as good, although this former favorite does have some virtues not in the current subject, such as both English and metric units of measure for all ingredients.This is a cookery subject on which you do not expect to find a serious treatment by a major cookbook author. Like blender recipes and toaster oven recipes and grill pan recipes and pressure cooker recipes, you usually find books which are little more than one step removed from a manufacturer's booklet, published by the likes of Sunset Press or other speciality publisher, not by the Harvard Commons Press. But, like Jean Anderson's book, `Process This' on food processor cookery, this is a first rate addition to any good cookbook library. In fact, not only is it better than Finlayson's book, it is a lot better than Anderson's book on the food processor.The quality of the book should be no surprise, given the track record of the principle author, Beth Hensperger. While she is not the leading currently active writer of books on bread (that honor would probably go to Peter Reinhart), she is easily one of the top three or four on the subject and has the James Beard awards to prove it. Co-author Kaufmann is less distinguished, but in reading her biographical sketch, it is clear this is a natural book for this pair, as they have already done a volume on rice cookers, and there are probably no two closer electrical cooking gadgets quite so close to one another as the rice cooker and the slow cooker. It probably also explains why there is relatively little in this book which tells one how to use a slow cooker as a rice cooker, since they already did a book on the subject AND, in spite of the strong similarities, there are enough differences to keep one from easily substituting one for the other.Aside from the rice cooker stand-in role, this book has simply everything I expected it to have. Every single recipe and every single type of recipe you might expect is here. One thing I hoped for and found, in spades, was a group of recipes for stocks and broths. This is something I have found in no other slow cooker book, as obvious as it is to include it.In spite of the fact that this is an excellent book which I would recommend to anyone wishing to cook with a slow cooker, I must insert the caveat here that while the slow cooker can be a modern version of time honored traditional cooking methods such as the braise, the daub, the tagine, and the Dutch oven techniques, many other recipes in this book are adaptations of techniques which may really be better done by other means. That is, the time saving gained by using the slow cooker may, in some cases, be gained by losing some culinary virtue. The best example I know is with the recipes for barbecued pork ribs. Adapting barbecue to the slow cooker is a natural, as both are low heat long cooking methods. But, you are approximating true barbecue and not producing a real barbecued result, as there is no smoke involved in the cooking. I will give one more plug to Ms. Finlayson's book on her pork rib barbecue recipe which I have done several times and I find it superior to the recipe for the same dish by Hensperger and Kaufmann. So, if you have Finlayson, Hensperger may not be a major advantage. But, if you have no slow cooker book and you want one, Ms. Hensperger and Ms. Kaufmann have given us the best one I have seen.It is quite possible that the single most valuable section in this book is in the chapter `From the Porridge Pot'. This gives several different recipes for breakfast dishes with oats, granola, and other varieties of porridge. I saw Alton Brown do this on his `Good Eats' show on oats and I really wished I could find someone with some more details on the technique. Well, here it is. Everything you always wanted to know about making hot breakfast meals with oats, millet, wheat, rice, barley and corn set up the night before and ready for you in the morning.The next best thing are all the general tips on slow cooking, including suggestions on how to adapt conventional braise, stew, and soup recipes to the slow cooker. One warning from this book which I will repeat here is that while the book includes recipes for several seafood dishes, almost all of them involve adding the seafood near the end of the long cooking period, so there are a fair number of recipes which require some mid-course or landing procedure intervention. But, the authors cover this point again and again.I am happy to see that the authors avoid endorsing any one slow cooker manufacturer, although they do give some tips on evaluating and selecting a slow cooker and the size of slow cooker best suited to various requirements.If you like to use the slow cooker or think it will fit into your lifestyle or just enjoy having a good book on every different cooking subject, then this is a book for you.Highly recommended.

The recipes in here are shockingly good- they go beyond the basic meat+condensed soup slow cooker recipes. I've enjoyed it so much that i've purchased additional copies to give as gifts.

I love my crockpots (I have two oval ones in different sizes). I have several crockpot cookbooks in my bookshelf and have also read many others which I borrowed from the library. After reading these books, I came to a sad conconclustion that most people who use crockpot are not "real cooks" from many cookbook authors assumption; they write books for those who use a crockpot to make "canned soup+meat+frozen/canned veggie dishes."I like quick and easy dishes and use canned soup occasionally but I don't want them to be the main item of my cooking.With this thought, I was surfing the net a couple of days ago hoping to find a crockpot cookbook using fresh wholesome food and I came across this book.The authors of this book created crockpot recipes for a cook like me (if you agree to my comment above, you will be happy to see this book!). After I read a couple of reviews by other Amazon users and bought this book (along with the Gourmet Slow Cooker Cookbook) from Amazon.Yes, it requires more prep time and more ingredients but isn't it worth making that much efforts for healthier and tastier meals?! YES!!Also, most ingredients appeared in this book are common items in my kitchen.The only minus (4 stars istead of 5 stars) is the lack of photos of the recipes. I read cookbooks for plesure and those sumptuous looking photos are important to me. I know it makes the book more expensive if you have photos but it would be great if there are several pages of photos under each category to show how good these dishes look! I would definitely pay several more dollars for the photos for this book!

Yes, I do agree with some reviews for the most part that some of the recipes do come out bland....at first. I learned to go heavy-handed on the required ingredients, and add other complimenting ingredients from recipes that are similar to the one I'm cooking. All I can say there, folks, is taste each dish before you plug it in to cook, and then dump another handful of cilantro, or cumin, or tumeric, or lemon juice, etc., if that's what sets it off for you. But, then again, that's the cardinal rule with cooking, no? Though, I have to say the one recipe for Tuscan White Bean Soup is simply out of this world, that is...once I doctored it to my taste buds. One of the ingredients calls for 1/4 cup of olive oil, which, quite frankly, would make this soup swim in oil. I doctored it to a more healthy serving of 2 tbsp instead.....and it came out fine. It also asks for Pancetta - cured ham. Well, even in my big, sophisticated metropolitan left-coast city, Pancetta that isn't sliced razor-thin for sandwiches is hard to find....and cheap it ain't. What did I use instead? Why, a few slices of good-ol' salt-pork did the trick. The same goes for the required shallots. Well, at $3.99/lb. for shallots, you better believe I'm gonna look for something similar....and cheaper.....and, that's why I used a plain-old yellow onion.....and it came out just fine. See what I mean? I made this recipe twice: the first time I followed the recipe verbatim, and it was nothing to write home about. But, as tenacity is in my blood, I had to improve upon it by pulling from similar recipes, AND going heavy-handed on the ingredients. So, what I'm saying is that this is a great book that requires a little elbow grease. You'll be glad you put forth the effort. So, why am I giving it 4 stars instead of 5? Because it could use some pictures, and nutritional information.

Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook is an American slow cooker cookbook with an unconventional slant. I bought it from Amazon after seeing it in a library when visiting my daughter in Wisconsin. There are dozens of recipes in the book for a wide variety of menus. I wouldn't want to try them all but this is a fun book to read as well as use as a cookbook. Recipes include: Breakfast porridge made with oats, barley or corn. Interesting soups Various chili recipes , some vegetarian, some with unusual ingredients such as bulgar wheat. Desserts, cakes and bread.If you like this book you may also be tempted to buy the follow ups with recipes for two/ entertaining/ family favourites etc. The authors have also produced similar cookbooks for other small domestic appliances

Loads of recipes. Some a bit more seemingly complicated but overall quite straight forward and easy.

I didn't get on with it as it was based on american food . Also the meals were mostly for large quantities and I only have a small slo cooker.

Great book

The recipes here are presented to be visually appealing, which is nice if you're serving for guests. I recently picked up a slow cooker, and decided on several books to go with it. There are a lot of decent recipes here.I've not enjoyed everything that has been presented, but everyone has their own tastes. This was not the best of the books I picked up, but there are some tasty options here, and there is a decent amount of variety. A lot of the other books seem to give you nine different chilli recipes or twelve variations on similar soups, etc.