Bachelor Cook Finds A Useful New Cooking Tool
You can laugh, you can snicker, you can ask “what took you so long” and you can even say “duh, dude!”
But I finally used a crockpot for the first time. And I LOVED it!
I am a pretty decent bachelor cook – my specialties are pasta and omelettes (every single guy should know how to make an omelette) – but for some reason have never braved the crockpot.
My grandmother gave me one for Christmas so long ago I don’t know how long I’ve had it and, despite my mom giving me some delicious recipes for chili and even a lasagna soup that she makes it her crockpot, I have never used it.
I didn’t exactly wake up and say “hey I’m going to use the crockpot today,” either. I messed up, thinking I had gotten one kind of meat to have for my Thanksgiving dinner only to find it was another kind that took four hours to cook. Naturally, I didn’t check the instructions until about an hour before I had planned to eat.
Frustrated, I pulled something else out of the fridge but vowed to cook my original choice the next day.
The meat was pork shoulder seasoned with whiskey and black pepper. And so I pulled out the crockpot and followed the instructions on the packet. Add an inch of water (having no ruler or tape measure handy, I eyeballed an inch), drop the roast into the crockpot, turn it to high, plug it in and don’t touch it for four hours.
Almost immediately a rich smell started to fill up the apartment.
Four hours later I lifted the lid to reveal a juicy piece of meat sitting in a deep-colored sauce. It smelled wonderful.
I put a large fork in the meat to pull it out of the pot but the meat was so tender the fork came out and the meat fell to the bottom of the pot with a splash of sauce.
So I pulled off a piece to try it and ON MY was it delicious!
By instinct, I grabbed a slice of bread and did something that is very common to us native Southerners, I dipped it in the sauce. As I was doing this, I was marveling at the minor miracle in front of me; after all, the only thing I did was put meat into some water
The sauce was a bonus. It something I did not expect to get from cooking the meat. I thought the water was to keep the meat from burning.
My dinner that night consisted of the meat plus a generous portion of the liquid poured on mashed potatoes and corn muffins. On the side, I added a glass of California red blend wine.
The only thing missing was a girl to share it with, something I will certainly be working on now that I know how to use a crockpot.
Here’s one other bonus I discovered from cooking in a crockpot. For leftovers, I just took the pot out of the heating element and put it in the fridge. There was no searching for the right-sized storage container. Perfect!
I am now going through those crockpot recipes mom wrote out for me and am definitely getting that pork roast again.
It’s funny how things turn out sometimes. My cooking mistake turned me into a crockpot fan. It took me a while to catch onto it but going forward it is going to be one of my “go-to” cooking tools.
Leave a Reply