Cooking with Your Crockpot - Don't Just Get Fast Foods or Resort to Frozen Meals

It's easy to be too tired to start cooking after a day at work and then resorting to either eating cereal, getting fast foods or making frozen dinners. Although frozen foods have improved over the years, you'll love the taste of a home-cooked meal made in your crockpot.

One thing I've found helpful is to start using the crockpot I had buried inside the cabinet. Using a good crockpot cook book enables me to prepare nutritious meals before heading out to work and having them be ready and heated through when I return.

I told my friend about this who is a single mom and she said her kids are thrilled now to have home cooked meals that taste good and have nice proportion of protein, carbohydrates and fat. It also helps the family connect and if everyone is busy the home-cooked meal on a subconscious level demonstrates care and affection.

Here's a few tips to keep in mind:

1) It's recommmended to not put frozen food into the crockpot. You need to defrost foods in advance so think this out when you do your meal planning. The consistency will be odd otherwise and it won't cook properly.

2) If you are using ground meat in the recipe it is good to cook it first in a pan ahead of time.

3) Tomatoes can overcook and get too soft if put in early so try to wait towards the end of the cooking time. This holds true for zucchini as well. Check your crockpot cook book for the ingredient list to think it through logically. You may need a few minutes after work to put in the final touches but this will be worth your time.

4)Don't peak at what you are cooking. When you pick up the lead, you let heat escape and then the cooking time will increase. It is tempting to peak but you are exposing heat and that will slow everything down.

5)There are crockpots with removable bowls and using these make cleanup much easier. If fast clean up is important to you , invest in a crockpot with this aspect.

Enjoy your crockpot and be stress free now when you drive back from work or come in from the kids' soccer games at 7 pm. You can avoid running in for fast foods and eat something that you'll find satisfying.