Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook

I rented this cookbook at the library hoping to find a few recipes to add to my recipe collection. There were so many great recipes that I had to buy the cookbook!

This cookbook has a large variety of interesting recipes, including an amazing array of chili and even dessert recipes. They are clear and easy to read. It includes recipes for several size of slow-cookers, and recipes usually require some type of stove-top preparation before placing ingredients into the cooker. I gave this as a wedding gift and recommend it for anyone with a slow-cooker.

Who knew there could be such a thing as a definitive slow cooker book, but I think this is it. This book is not only full of recipes (350 of them), but there is a slow cooker basics section that was absolutely wonderful -- more well written than the instructions for my new Rival Crock Pot. I love that the book has such a large variety of recipes ranging from soups to desserts, vegetarian to meat, traditional to contmporary and simple to complex (not too complex). If you're only going to buy one slow cooker book, let this be the one. (This book along with a new slow cooker would make an excellent gift for the new cook or busy cook.) If you're a crock pot master and are really looking to shake things up, you may want to consider The Gourmet Slow Cooker instead of or in addition to. It has way fewer recipes, about 55, but they are certainly international and inspiring.

I love cookbooks and I love to cook. Until now my least favorite cookbooks have been my crockpot books. BORING! So my crockpot only gets pulled out when I need to cook a pot of beans or take something to a potluck. What a shame. I mean, what could be more convenient, safe, and economical than cooking with an appliance that you can leave unattended for hours and that doesn't heat your whole kitchen? "Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook" is facinating and exciting. Why? Because of so many healthful, whole grain ideas, such as the "From the Porridge Pot" and "Rice and Other Grains" chapters. And soups! We will be eating soup all winter....I can't wait to try all of the recipes included in this section, including all of the stock recipes (chicken, turkey, beef, vegetable, and variations). From my bookshelves full of cookbooks, this has taken its place as one of my top two or three favorite cookbooks. This cookbook is substantial, with over 500 pages of recipes and slow cooker how-to. Casseroles, poultry, beef, pork, fish, side dishes, stews and desserts are all included. The only pictures are on the front and back covers. They are beautiful and I do wish there were a few more pictures included. It has been a while since I have been this excited about a cookbook (quite an accomplishment, as I do get quite excited about cookbooks). I wish there were a forum where I could read reviews of the various recipes, just to help me decide which recipe I will try next! Highly recommend.

`Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook' by expert bread cookbook author Beth Hensperger and Julie Kaufmann is hands down the very best book on its subject you are likely to find. It is easily twice the size of my former slow cooker favorite, Judith Finlayson's `The 150 best Slow Cooker recipes' and easily more than twice as good, although this former favorite does have some virtues not in the current subject, such as both English and metric units of measure for all ingredients. This is a cookery subject on which you do not expect to find a serious treatment by a major cookbook author. Like blender recipes and toaster oven recipes and grill pan recipes and pressure cooker recipes, you usually find books which are little more than one step removed from a manufacturer's booklet, published by the likes of Sunset Press or other speciality publisher, not by the Harvard Commons Press. But, like Jean Anderson's book, `Process This' on food processor cookery, this is a first rate addition to any good cookbook library. In fact, not only is it better than Finlayson's book, it is a lot better than Anderson's book on the food processor. The quality of the book should be no surprise, given the track record of the principle author, Beth Hensperger. While she is not the leading currently active writer of books on bread (that honor would probably go to Peter Reinhart), she is easily one of the top three or four on the subject and has the James Beard awards to prove it. Co-author Kaufmann is less distinguished, but in reading her biographical sketch, it is clear this is a natural book for this pair, as they have already done a volume on rice cookers, and there are probably no two closer electrical cooking gadgets quite so close to one another as the rice cooker and the slow cooker. It probably also explains why there is relatively little in this book which tells one how to use a slow cooker as a rice cooker, since they already did a book on the subject AND, in spite of the strong similarities, there are enough differences to keep one from easily substituting one for the other. Aside from the rice cooker stand-in role, this book has simply everything I expected it to have. Every single recipe and every single type of recipe you might expect is here. One thing I hoped for and found, in spades, was a group of recipes for stocks and broths. This is something I have found in no other slow cooker book, as obvious as it is to include it. In spite of the fact that this is an excellent book which I would recommend to anyone wishing to cook with a slow cooker, I must insert the caveat here that while the slow cooker can be a modern version of time honored traditional cooking methods such as the braise, the daub, the tagine, and the Dutch oven techniques, many other recipes in this book are adaptations of techniques which may really be better done by other means. That is, the time saving gained by using the slow cooker may, in some cases, be gained by losing some culina