Thursday, December 23, 2010

Slow cooker red cabbage recipe

Maybe it's the colour but I can't help thinking of red cabbage as being extremely festive. Beside which, it goes so well with ham and, now I've seen the light (and the ease of cooking it in the slow cooker), we'll have a lot of that around this Christmas!

It's very easy in the slow cooker once you have a decent recipe and this seemed to hit the spot for us, even if it has some slightly unusual ingredients. It's another cadge from Nigella - I'm obviously in a Nigella phase - and is supposed to be Viennese style. I'm happy to believe her.

Ingredients for 6:

1 large red cabbage, shredded not too finely
1 large onion, sliced
2tbsp brown sugar
2 eating apples (Nigella uses 1 large cooking apple)
3 tbsp red wine or cider vinegar
200 ml beef stock (made with a cube is fine)


Directions:

Yup. Dump it all in. Walk away. This is why we love our slow cookers. Cook on Low for 6-8 hours or High for 4-6.

Verdict:

Really, really good. It had that nice sweet/sour thing going on without it being too tart (my apples were quite sweet) and without losing the flavour of the cabbage. I'm sure it would be fine with vegetable stock if the beef seemed odd to you but I liked it; I thought it added depth. If you like the idea, Nigella suggest stirring in some crème fraiche or sour cream at the end but I just didn't see it somehow.


Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Slow cooker kedgeree recipe



No, don't worry. You've not got a bad link. This great recipe is moments away, right here

I'm gradually transferring all my Blighty recipes to a new blog called The Errant Sock. As well as slow cooker recipes, you'll get lots of other conventional recipes with lots designed to avoid common allergens, plus crafts, reviews, parenting and home hacks, all with the same dash of realism and humour that you get here. So do take a look around and let me know what you think!

Hope to see you in a few seconds over on the Sock!

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Slow cooker baked sweet potatoes recipe

So, so easy. Best of all, I combined this with the Overnight sausages recipe and it totally, totally worked. I just set up the sausages as per the recipe and plonked the foil-wrapped sweet potatoes on top. Genius. Sausages and baked sweet potatoes being the perfect partners, it was a happy day in the Eccentric household.


Ingredients:

Sweet potatoes. Predictable, but true.

Directions:

Wrap as many clean but unpeeled sweet potatoes in tin foil as you wish to eat. Put them in your slow cooker. Cook on High for 4 Hours or on Low for 8. Done. We eat these with chilli butter, simply mashing a few dried chilli flakes into about a tbsp of butter per potato. It's a great addition.

Verdict:

This was a perfect meal. Easy, good contrasts, colourful, filling but not stodgy. I could happily eat this once a week. It's just there are so many recipes I want to try....

Monday, December 20, 2010

Slow cooker festive ham recipe




Slow cooker festive ham recipe


Don't worry! You're not in the wrong place! You're mere seconds away from this recipe. It's right here.


The recipes on Slow Cooked in Blighty are gradually being moved to my new blog The Errant Sock which will have all the slow cooker recipes you love, plus a host of other goodies like other recipes, many for those with food intolerances, book reviews, product recommendations, craft ideas and more.

So do come join us over there and make yourself at home. See you in a couple of seconds over on Sock.

Slow cooker spiced mulled apple recipe - yum!

This is so easy it can't really be called a recipe; more a discovery. It's the perfect festive drink for kids, for drivers, for those who've had enough already this week or for days when you feel like a treat but are still in charge of a toddler for the next two hours. Sigh!

Ingredients for 4:

1L / 4 cups apple juice - the cheap, clear stuff with no bits
1 sachet mulled wine spices - the kind that looks like a tea bag

Directions:

Put ALL the ingredients (it's confusingly complex) in the slow cooker. Cook on High for 2 hours.

Verdict:

I'm making this every other day now. It hasn't been this cold in Britain in my life time and we need drinks like this to cheer us up. Although great for a festive party, this will also work for the whole winter. I believe.. I intend to test this theory heavily.

PS You can make this on the hob too. Simmer ingredients in a pan for 15 minutes.

Friday, December 17, 2010

Easy slow cooker Christmas pudding recipe

Don't worry! You're mere seconds away from this recipe. It's right here.

The recipes on Slow Cooked in Blighty are gradually being moved to my new blog The Errant Sock which will have all the slow cooker recipes you love, plus a host of other goodies like other recipes, many for those with food intolerances, book reviews, product recommendations, craft ideas and many more.

So do come join us over there and make yourself at home. See you in a couple of seconds over on Sock.

Monday, December 13, 2010

Nigella's Venetian Roast chicken recipe - the slow cooker way!

No, don't worry. You've not got a bad link. This great recipe is moments away, right here

I'm gradually transferring all my Blighty recipes to a new blog called The Errant Sock. As well as slow cooker recipes, you'll get lots of other conventional recipes with lots designed to avoid common allergens, plus crafts, reviews, parenting and home hacks, all with the same dash of realism and humour that you get here. So do take a look around and let me know what you think!

Hope to see you in a few seconds over on the Sock!

Sunday, December 12, 2010

Slow cooker split pea soup recipe

It's Sunday night which means it's soup night! Here's a brilliant winter soup, full of flavour with ideas for flavours cadged from many different recipes. I love it when you pull the best from several different recipes and it all works.

Ingredients for 6:


1 horseshoe shaped smoked sausage - about 1lb or 400-500g  (I use Mattheson's low fat for this and the shape is actually immaterial!) OR a ham hock - see verdict for instructions
500g/16 oz pack yellow split peas
1/2 onion, diced
2 medium carrots, sliced thickly
1.25 L or 5 cups vegetable broth (I used 2 cubes of Marigold bouillon)
1 stick celery, sliced
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp mace
2 bay leaves


Directions:

Add everything to your pot and cook on Low for 8-10 hours (or on High for 4-6). You may wish to semi-blend at the end using a stick blender but we found it unnecessary.

Verdict:

Fab.U.Lous. Easy, comforting, filling food, just right after time outside on a cold winter's day. The mace really makes this but don't overdo it; it's a powerful, bossy flavour and can take over. The split peas after 10 hours were really silky and needed no blending and I like to have some texture to my soup so left the veggies in their chunks.

You could make this with a ham hock, in which case you'd want to take it out at the end and scrape the meat back into the soup, discarding the bone.

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Slow cooker plum and ginger compote recipe

This was so easy and so delicious! Autumn in a bowl.Yes, it is photographed on the floor. No, there wasn't a counter clean at that precise moment. That's what happens when you cook 8 slow cooker recipes in 4 days. (Festive ham, red cabbage and Christmas pudding coming up amongst others, if you're interested!)


Ingredients for 2 (Double or triple this up. You'll want more):

1lb/500g plums, halved and stoned, slightly under-ripe ones are fine
1/2" root ginger, grated
2 tbsp honey (more  if your plums are slightly under-ripe)

Directions:

Place ingredients in slow cooker. Cook on High for 2-3 hours or Low for 4-6. Serve with thick natural yoghurt or vanilla ice cream.

Verdict:

Why didn't I know about this before? Stewed fruits in the slow cooker are almost always brilliant (apples, pears etc.) but the ginger and honey totally made this. Yum! Mellow, unctuous, the slight ginger fieriness against the cool yoghurt. Ravishing.



Monday, December 6, 2010

Timmy's slow cooked pork shoulder recipe

This was the joint pre-roasting. It appears
the final meal was not photographed. I was probably
distracted by hunger! 
I'd been meaning to cook this recipe for about ten years now. I had it written on a scrap of paper in my recipe file and was just looking for the right occasion. My brother Timmy is a great cook and I knew anything he liked would be awesome. The recipe, it turned out on asking, was taken from Jamie Oliver's book "Cooking with Jamie". Finally, I had my chance....a pork shoulder with Timmy's name on it, just waiting to be cooked. It wasn't the dinosaur-proportioned 11-15 lb shoulder that Mr Oliver suggests cooking over a full 18 hours, but I thought the method for cooking a joint that size should work on a smaller 3lb shoulder over about 8 hours.  And we were hungry...

Ingredients for 4:

1 tablespoons fennel seeds
1/2 tablespoon sea or rock salt
1 fennel bulb, trimmed and roughly chopped
2 medium carrots, peeled and roughly chopped
2 smallish onions peeled and roughly chopped
4 cloves garlic,  roughly smashed
Small bunch of fresh thyme
1 2-4 lb piece of pork shoulder on the bone, preferably free-range or organic, skin scored
Olive oil
100 ml bottle of white wine
200 ml pint chicken or vegetable stock

Directions:

Crush the fennel seeds with the salt in a pestle and mortar until fine. Put the roughly chopped vegetables, garlic, and thyme sprigs into the slow cooker. Pat the pork shoulder with olive oil and sit it on top of the vegetables. Now massage all the smashed fennel seeds into the skin of the pork, making sure you push them right into all the scores to maximize the flavour. Add the wine and stock to the bottom of the slow cooker.
Cook the pork on low for 8 to 12 hours, until the meat is soft and fork tender. Remove the pork to a warm place and mash the veggies into the pan juices to create a lovely gravy.

Lovely served with roast potatoes and other roasted root veg. 

Verdict:

You know what? This was perfectly acceptable but, for all people had raved wildly about it, I expected more "wow factor" and it simply didn't grab me that much. The texture was tender and moist - what the slow cooker is best at -  and the taste was fine but not exactly knock 'em dead.

In the end, I went back to the original recipe and found out that the roast was given an initial burst of very high heat before roasting slowly overnight. So, if you want to try this, a good browning in a large frying pan before putting the pork into the slow cooker might be a good idea to maximise the flavour or you could even start the pork off in a very high oven, just till it browns and then transfer it to a waiting bed of vegetables. I think personally I may look for other pork pot roast recipes rather than try and make this work better. 

Sunday, December 5, 2010

Slow cooker herby roast chicken recipe

slowcookerroastchicken

You're just one click away from this recipe - it's here! - and its new home at The Errant Sock where you will also find many non-slow cooker recipes, allergen-avoiding recipes and cooking tips, book reviews, easy craft ideas and parenting hacks.

I hope you'll come and look around. If you like Blighty, you'll love The Errant Sock!

See you in a second or two!

Jennie