Fix it and Forget it Cookbook: Feasting with your Slow Cooker
Written: Nov 10 '04
Product Rating:
Pros: Voluminous, no-frills, wide variety of recipes.
Cons: No recipe testing. Just a huge list of recipes, nothing else really.
The Bottom Line: Get this book for a great big huge varied international list of crock pot recipes. Don't get it for pretty pictures, cooking instruction or buying advice.
snpmurray's Full Review: Dawn J. Ranck and Phyllis Pellman Good - Fix-It an...
This is a book that I use a good deal, and will be fairly straightforward to review. This is a large repository of recipes for the slow cooker. That is the chief recommendation for this book, and really its main selling point is the sheer quantity and variety of recipes.
The book has two authors, and though both of them have been previously involved in the publication of books of other recipes and on cooking in general they do not profess to have any especial knowledge of crockpot cooking. Neither, it should be noted, do they claim to have tested any of the recipes in the book as far as I can see from a careful re-reading of the entire book in preparation for writing a review.
In a similarly vague fashion, the authors do not state from what sources the recipes in the book were compiled. They say that in compiling the book they eliminated “a lot of duplicates” but do not enlighten us where the original list came from that they did the eliminating from. Things worth bearing in mind.
Anyway, these things aside, things which would normally greatly dissuade me from a cookbook, this book does still make itself very useful because if its volume of recipes. When you consider how hard it is to find crockpot recipes for vegetarians for example, any book which devotes a large chapter to nothing but such recipes is valuable. Here are the divisions in this recipe book:
Appetizers snacks and spreads
Soups, stews and chilis
Breakfast foods
Main dishes
Bean main dishes
Vegetables
Desserts
Beverages
The style of presentation of both each chapter and each recipe is fairly basic. There is no preamble at the beginning of each chapter introducing the style of food, as is common in some cookbooks. Neither are any techniques for the use of a crockpot included…no tour of the variety of styles and features available, no discussion of thawing times or anything like it….just a chapter heading, and then a slew of recipes.
The recipes themselves are likewise presented with the minimum of fuss. This is pretty appropriate, since the crockpot is not a complicated technology, and the whole point of using one is to just throw the ingredients into it and forget all about it as the title implies.
Where ingredients do need to be added in a particular order or in a particular way, this is duly included in the instructions, but for the most part don’t expect much instruction. There is likewise no illustration at all. This book is a wholesale no frills event. The Wal-mart of crockpot recipe books…plenty for your money, but few attempts at an aesthetic experience. No glossy photographs, no illustrated diagrams of how to turn the dial from “low” to “high” or pictures of happy employees enjoying a pot luck with half a dozen dishes they all prepared at home and transport in their crock-cozies.
There are a great number of recipes in here which I had never heard of anywhere else…Lots of foods from all over the world which slow cook very well and taste divine. There is very much an international feel to the enclosed recipes. Chicken dishes from the Americas, Europe and East Asia are all represented, and the same goes for pretty much all categories. I can’t even pronounce some of the dishes, but I surely plan to try nearly all of them. Of those recipes that I have already used from this book (around thirty I would say) almost all turned out to make good tasting food.
All the old standards for crockpot cooks are well represented. There are several pages of recipes for example for chili. These are varied indeed, stretching from veggie chili and very mild versions through to hot stuff. Likewise roasts and single pot meals are very well represented.
Throughout the book are sprinkled little advice boxes with hints and tips on the use of the crockpot. These are useful, but repetitive. There are many versions of the old adage “don’t peek…you’ll let the heat out” in different guises for example. Again, all of this gives the book the feel of somewhat having been thrown together without a great deal of thought.
There is a table of contents at the front of the book and a good and useful index at the back.
I would buy this book over again, that’s for sure…I am a bargain store shopper, I like the idea of varied bulk at the cost of aesthetic appeal. Such is the design of this book.
Who?s hungry? EVERYONE. Who has time to cook? NO ONE.Dig out the slow cooker. Add a second and a third if you wish. Fill one with main-dish fixins and...More at HotBookSale
This New York Times bestseller includes more than 800 wonderful recipes, and has already sold more than 4 million copies! Scrumptious slow cooker favo...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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