Tastes of Culture

Is there really any truth to the assumption that cooking with a crock pot, or slow cooker, saves you both money and time? How exactly can a crock pot do this?

Save Time With a Crock Pot – This may seem like an oxymoron to some people. After all, how can having a meal in the crock pot for eight hours save time? It all depends on your lifestyle and your routine for dinnertime, but most have to agree that getting dinner in the crock pot, then walking away from any further time spent in the kitchen, definitely frees up time.

Gone are the days of someone being home all day to prepare the family meals. In this day and age of the busy, scattered family, we need to rely on more than one person to get dinner on the table. Because using a crock pot doesn’t expose youngsters to hot burners and open flames, getting the little ones in the family, and the less experienced cooks, involved becomes much easier. Simply having someone there to help throw ingredients into the crock pot can be a big help. Now, it’s a joint venture and meal preparation is shared, freeing up some much needed time for you to focus on other chores.

Even standing over a stove and stirring a pot, watching it boil so to speak, is time that you could have for something else. Once the ingredients are in the crock pot, you can walk away and get on with your day and your errands. When you walk back into your kitchen, you have a delicious meal without that time-consuming pot watching. That’s certainly a time saver.

Frantic stops at the grocery store to quick grab something for dinner are a huge waste of time. You know you’re going to spend 30 minutes or more wandering around the store trying to think of something to cook for dinner. Of course, as time goes by, the choices for dinner start to narrow as time starts to slip further and further away. Planning two or three simple crock pot meals for the week allows you to consolidate your shopping trips into one instead of wasting time stopping every night trying to figure out what to cook. The time it takes to plan the meals and the shopping trip never adds up to the time you spend stopping every night in a panic. And, it’s so nice to come straight home after a busy day to enjoy a delicious meal.

Save Money With a Crock Pot – There are a couple schools of thought here. One is saving on your food, and the other is saving on energy. How exactly can cooking with a crock pot save on your food budget? And why would running a crock pot for six hours be cheaper than running your oven for three hours?

When you’re at the grocery store looking at beef, for instance, you’ll want to walk right by those expensive cuts and move over to the bargain cuts. Why? Slow cooking meat, at a low temperature, in a moist environment, is the best way to cook less expensive cuts. The sinew and connective tissues of the budget cuts break down under those conditions and the meat becomes tender, falling apart with a fork. More expensive cuts simply don’t cook as well, either, and are not worth the money. Good old rump roasts, pork shoulders, and the like are perfect for your crock pot – and your budget! Soups and stews, classic budget-friendly meals, are also a perfect match for your crock pot.

Considering the design of a crock pot, it just makes sense that you are using less energy when you cook with your crock pot for extended periods of time. Take, for instance, cooking a pot roast in your oven. That meal is committing your oven to roughly 2500 watts, whereas that same pot roast in a crock pot would be committing about 200 watts for the same meal. So, a 3 hour oven cooked pot roast would use 10 kWh, while a 6 hour crock pot cooked roast would use about 1.2 kWh. These are rough estimates, but you can see how using a miniature oven, your crock pot, to do extended cooking will save money on your energy bills.

If you are a busy family with children, you know how often you get stuck during that evening rush without dinner plans. Have you called your husband to pick up dinner at the fast food place more than once this week? You know that is a real budget-buster! While you’re running your child to piano lessons, or baseball practice, your crock pot can be working away cooking up dinner, saving you from yet another stop of the fast food place. No more frantic calls to the spouse for take out! That’s more money saved.

Save Both Time and Money With a Crock Pot – With a larger crock pot, say a 6 quart size, you can put together a big meal, cook it once, and plan to turn the leftovers into several more meals that will last the rest of the week. If you normally buy a lunch out every day, you can also save money by bringing your own home-cooked meal to work. Along with that, you can skip running around for lunch, saving your time for something more important. By cooking more than one meal in the same eight hour period of time, you are also saving energy. Cooking once and eating, two, three, or more times is a big way to save on both time and money.

Saving time and saving money seem to be pretty evident in these examples. Crock pots, when put to work, are an excellent way to not only save your budget and your time, for possibly your sanity, too. You have a family to take care of and a household to run. You definitely don’t need to have that nightmare every night of your hungry family crying “when’s dinner?” Now, you can answer “it’s in the crock pot!

Grab your old slowcooker recipes, search for a few new recipes, and brush up on your slowcooker cooking methods! It’s time to get started and get serious saving money with your slowcooker!