Slow Cook Modern , livre ebook

ABRAMS BOOKS - Krissoff Liana Krissoff

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383 pages

English

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Beloved for her fresh, modern canning recipes, Liana Krissoff is back with modern slow cooker recipes that are sophisticated, full of flavor and spice, and thoughtfully designed for those who wish to use their slow cookers on weekdays, when they can leave the Crock-Pot on all day. In Slow Cook Modern, Krissoff shares more than 150 recipes, including quick, fresh side dishes created for the adventurous home cook. All the slow cooker recipes are true 8-hour dishes, so you can actually prepare each dish in the morning and finish it quickly when you get home. The goal is to help people make complete meals with ease: Tarragon and Creme Fraiche Chicken with Cranberry-Orange Wild Rice, Curried Pork Loin with Roasted Squash and Scotch Bonnet Sauce, and more. Filled with recipes using real, fresh ingredients, Slow Cook Modern allows busy people with eclectic tastes to come home to a nourishing meal every night of the week.

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Publié par	ABRAMS BOOKS
Date de parution	12 septembre 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781683351078
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	22 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
How to Use This Book
Choosing a Slow Cooker
Other Useful Tools
Choosing Ingredients for Long-Haul Slow Cooking
Slow Cooker Safety
Other Ideas for Rounding Out a Meal
1 VEGETARIAN AND VEGAN
2 CHICKEN, TURKEY, AND DUCK
3 PORK
4 BEEF
5 LAMB AND GOAT
WEEKEND SLOW COOKING
LAGNIAPPE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
MAIN DISHES WITH EASY MORNING PREP
MAIN DISHES WITH EASY EVENING FINISH
INDEX OF ACCOMPANIMENTS
INDEX OF SEARCHABLE TERMS
INTRODUCTION
Dear reader, I don t know what your life is like, but I do know that if you work during the day you re probably not all that interested in slow cooker recipes that require less than eight hours of cooking time or some sort of intermediate attention during the cooking process. You re probably not going to need a bunch of slow cooker recipes for shellfish, or desserts, or side dishes, either.
What you need, I m guessing, are recipes for slow cooker main dishes that can cook completely unattended for at least as long as the typical workday, that are delicious and family-pleasing but also interesting and varied. And you probably wouldn t mind some easy, streamlined accompaniments and suggestions for rounding out each meal. You probably want dinners to come home to.
If this is an accurate representation of your needs and desires, you ve opened the right book.
All the main dishes here can be put in the slow cooker in the morning, left unattended for at least eight hours, and finished up in the evening (or just served without further ado). The very simple side dishes and accompaniments-breads and grains, vegetables, salads, toppings, and sauces-can either be made in the morning and stashed in the fridge or be thrown together in the evening just before serving. Some of them are so simple that they really don t need a recipe at all, while others are just a little more involved.
I ve tried to match slow cooker main dishes with accompaniments in such a way that the timing makes sense: If you re doing a fair amount of prep on one of them, whether in the morning or evening, ideally you won t have to do too much work on the other at the same time; if you have to puree a sauce in the slow cooker or do some other finishing task in the evening, a side is either already waiting or roasting quietly on its own in the oven. In short, you ll never have all the burners going, literally or figuratively.
As you flip through these recipes, you ll note that some dishes will need a bit of attention just before serving. Please don t feel discouraged because you know how exhausted you will be by the time you get back to your kitchen. Here s a mental trick I ve learned over the years that s really helped me cook better, more complete and interesting meals on a reasonably frequent basis: It s easier to motivate yourself to finish up meal preparations if you have a plan, and especially if that plan is already in motion when you walk in the door. There will be food-a lot of food, a finished meal or an almost-finished meal-waiting for you in the slow cooker, and all you have to do is this and this and look, the bowl and immersion blender you need to do that are out and ready, the brown rice to accompany the slow cooker dish has been parboiled and is already in the steamer basket (thank you, barely caffeinated morning self!), and all you have to do is move it to the stove and turn on the heat
The point is to free yourself from having to make decisions and develop a dinner strategy after a long day of work. If I had to do that every day, my brain would implode and I d probably declare make-your-own-sandwich night or order delivery more times than I d prefer. There s absolutely nothing wrong with sandwiches and delivery food (I adore both options and invoke them pretty often), but I think we all can benefit from as much culinary variety as we can manage, and improving our home cooking organizational and planning skills is a fine way to do that.
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
At the risk of this becoming incredibly goofy and awkward, let s walk through a recipe together. How about the first one in the book, Eggplant Tian-my version of a classic French vegetable casserole that s usually baked forever in the oven, the cook pushing it down with a spatula every half hour or so. Here it s paired with a side dish of olive-marinated fresh mozzarella, but there are other accompaniments throughout the book that might go well with it too, so I ve listed those just after the recipe title. If on any day another side dish in the book appeals to you more than the one that accompanies the recipe, use a cover flap to mark it.
After a little introduction, you ll see the plan, a skeleton version of the recipe that tells you the main tasks the recipe will ask you to complete in the morning and in the evening. You ll see that, to make this tian, in the morning you ll load up the cooker (pretty easy), and in the evening you ll be saut ing some bread crumbs (also easy, but it does require the stovetop).
Still on board with the tian? Okay! Round up the ingredients. The recipe instructions begin with your morning tasks. Do those, and set the slow cooker for eight hours on low. You ve had a cup of coffee by now and are feeling energetic. Any other morning tasks listed? Nope, all clear. Check your side dish recipe. Anything you can do in the morning ? Yep, go ahead and do those tasks, too.
Now, what I d do before heading off to work is skim the evening instructions to see if you ll need any skillets or spoons or spatulas to finish up your meal when you get home. In this case, you can see you ll need a skillet and a spoon, so dig those out so they re ready when you walk in the door. You can even measure out your bread crumbs and display them- hint, hint -near the skillet. Keep this beautiful book propped open and out on the counter too.
When you get home, you ll be greeted by the ridiculously enticing aroma of basil and garlic and roasted peppers and fruity olive oil. You ll suddenly remember you put a tian in the slow cooker, and be pleased with your foresight. Don t forget there s a tangy-salty mozzarella salad marinating in the fridge; pull it out and set it on the table to warm up a bit, maybe sneaking a shred as you do-it s been a long day. You ll notice next to the stove a little cup of what looks like bread crumbs? What the-? And you ll remember your plan: Quickly fry those up for a crunchy topping for your tian, which smells even better when you finally lift the lid of the slow cooker to take a peek. It s a little watery, which is understandable because it s been simmering here under a lid all day, so you scoop off some of the liquid: now, perfect. Let the tian settle a bit while you set plates and forks out and pour drinks, spread those toasty bread crumbs over the top, and dig in.
CHOOSING A SLOW COOKER
All the slow cooker main dishes in this book were developed for 3 - or 4-quart (3.3- or 3.8-L) slow cookers, which I find to be the most useful for a small family. Our family of three always has leftovers from dishes cooked in a cooker of this size, and rarely do I cook a slow cooker meal that requires more than three or four pounds (1.4 or 1.8 kg) of meat. I do use a larger, 6-quart (5.7-L) slow cooker for making stocks ( this page ), since it doesn t make much sense to prepare small batches of stock.
If what you have now is a larger slow cooker, and you don t wish to donate that one to charity and replace it with a smaller model, consider increasing the quantities in these recipes by at least 50 percent to keep the ingredients from cooking too quickly.
I ve tried out many, many slow cookers over the years, and, honestly, the different makes and models are all pretty comparable in terms of the finished product, so you should just choose the one that has the features that are important to you: a countdown timer, say, or an automatic keep-warm setting, a lid that can be clamped down for leak-free transport (to the local bar if you live in the Midwest, for example), an extra-low simmer setting for more-than-eight-hour days, or an attractive housing.
Probably the most important extra to consider is the automatic keep-warm feature, which is helpful in two common scenarios: If you re held up and can t get home to turn off the slow cooker at the eight-hour mark, the cooker will switch to warm to keep the dish at a safe and ready-to-eat temperature for several hours without overcooking. And if there s a dish that would be better if it didn t cook for the full eight hours, you can set the cooker for, say, six hours and it ll be fine if you re away from the kitchen for longer than that.
One feature that I do not find useful for my purposes is a stovetop-ready insert-that is, a pot that can be used on a burner to brown ingredients (or in the cooker itself on a sear or similar hot setting) and then transferred to the slow cooker housing (or turned down to low) to finish cooking. The inserts are always nonstick-finished, and that limits you to medium heat on the stovetop-I like more firepower when browning. It also means using nonstick-friendly tongs and spatulas, which I find irritating because they re not as stiff and sturdy as the stainless-steel ones. And nonstick pans are simply not as good at browning as cast-iron skillets or a heavy tri-ply saut pan. But the main reason I don t brown in stovetop-ready inserts is this: If your goal is to let the dish cook for a full day with no attention, starting the ingredients out in an insert that s hot from the stovetop is a disadvantage-the food will come up to temperature more quickly and will be at much greater risk of overcooking. I prefer to brown in a skillet or saut pan (deglazing will practically clean the pan anyway, so cleanup isn t much of an issue) and transfer the browned food to a good old-fashioned ceramic insert for the slow cooking part of the process.
So which one should you buy? Short version: Slow cookers in the 3 - to 4-