Tag Archives: balance

Slow cooker liners: to line or not to line?

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I think it was an impulse buy on dh’s part, when he was at Bed, Bath & Beyond prior to Christmas. He found a package of slow cooker liners and, knowing my luuuurrve of the crock pot, decided to buy me some. A few weeks later, now that the crock pot is up and humming a few times a week, I decided to bust one out and see how they work.

Many recipes don’t need a liner – you can clean up most crocks easily enough, especially if you sprayed them with Pam or some other non-stick cooking spray prior to loading them up. It’s the recipes where things cake or harden or crust on bottom or the sides where you feel like you’re going to give yourself a repetitive stress injury (RSI) trying to clean the crock after dinner. Inspired to make a Mexican Meatloaf, I thought this was a perfect time to try out the liner. After all, meatloaf in the crock pot is tasty, but it can be a complete PAIN to clean up. More than once, the crock has had to soak for quite a while before we can manage to get it clean.

Opening up the package, I was disturbed to find that the liner was wider than it was tall. While I know that these liners were designed to fit all crock pots – oval or round – this was a dish to go into our round 4qt crock pot, and I was worried that the liner wouldn’t reach all the way to the top. What then?

 

Meatloaf pre-crock

Mexican Meatloaf - in the liner but not yet moved to the crock

 

Turns out, my fears were unfounded – there was plenty of excess to slop over the top. Better still, moving the crock to the stove allowed me to move the entire liner to the cutting board in one quick trip. The amount of moisture in the liner was what I would’ve expected, and (as I’ll discuss when I post the recipe), there was ZERO departure from the usual moisture level by using the liner – meaning the liner had no impact on the quality of the outcome.

 

Meatloaf in crock

Mexican meatloaf, in liner, with plenty of excess liner to hang out of the 4qt round crock

 

And, the icing on this cake was finding that my crock was BONE DRY when I removed the bag. There was ZERO leakage. Of course, removing the meatloaf from the bag wasn’t a completely easy task; it’s not like you can flip over a meatloaf when there’s glaze on top and a small amount of grease in the bag. I siphoned the (really incredibly small) amount of grease that accumulated in the bag with a bulb baster and then trimmed the bag with kitchen shears. I was then able to use a thick pancake turner to remove the meatloaf. Sure, some of the meatloaf stayed with the bag – but no more so than we’d lose to the bottom of the crock pot during a non-lined cooking…and this time, there was no scrubbing involved!

 

Crock post-liner

The 4qt round crock, just after the liner was removed - DRY AS A BONE!

 

Now, I know that these things aren’t cheap. From what I’ve heard, it sounds like they typically run about $1 per liner. And, as I mentioned above, in many cases, they’re just not necessary. Still, if you have a hard-to-clean dish, there’s no reason NOT to use one unless you have an anti-plastic/environmental concern (at which point you could also argue about the extra water and detergent that are required to scrub off the inside of the crock…at least a break-even situation). I wouldn’t recommend them for everyday crock pot action, since I think that’s overkill, but if you have an RSI or if you have one of those tough dishes, no need to struggle now that technology has been invented to solve the problem for you.

As someone with tendonitis in both arms (from typing), washing dishes for ages and vigorous scrubbing can be really hard on my hands and arms. So, for the cases where I know these will come in handy, I’ll definitely use them. I highly recommend picking up even a small package and giving them a try – for the time-crunched, every little bit helps!

Adventures in CSA – going off the rails…

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So, I’ve been rubbish about posting on a regular basis. Excuses, excuses, yadda yadda. Let’s just say my motivation has hit somewhat of a low. That has something to do with being at the tail end of two kids with back-to-back bouts of pneumonia (the only fun part being that the medicine they were put on is what we now call PRINCESS SPARKLY MEDS and it IS magical). I’ve also been really busy at work, so by the time I get home, the kids are fed & in bed and the kitchen’s back in order, it’s all I can do just to check twitter & fb and maybe score a few rounds against those egg-stealing pigs before I go face-plant on my bed.

All of this has taken some of the steam out of the whole cooking local effort, since it makes it really hard to plan for heavily locally-sourced meals when you’re just trying to keep your head above water. I know very few people who manage to do a lot of cooking from scratch throughout the week where A) both adults work full-time day jobs out of the house, and B) there’s at least one child living in the house. I have a brontosaurus-sized bone to pick with folks like Anthony Bourdain, who stick their nose up in the air at anything boxed or canned; we don’t all have the luxury of taking hours to make dinner each night. Sometimes, even one hour is more than we can muster. On any given day, I’m home just under 45 minutes from when we want dinner on the table. That doesn’t give a lot of leeway.

That’s why I was really annoyed when I listened to this piece on NPR, because it still missed part of the point. While the chef is preparing a risotto that’s inexpensive to pull together, there’s no mention of how *quickly* it can come together. If a risotto takes no less than 45 minutes (on a good day, and when working with a simple recipe), how on earth is it something that can be managed by an exhausted parent, coming home after the end of a long workday, trying to manage kids while making this inexpensive-yet-not-boxed meal?

So, there’s a part of me that says that this is unrealistic. That’s not to say that I’m giving up. It just means that I’m trying to be realistic about it. We have a food crisis on this planet. For starters, there’s plenty of food, but it’s not being distributed to everybody who needs it. Rich nations get fat, and poor nations are starving. That’s just insane.  Second, we have people who can’t make ends meet in our own neighborhoods – regardless of how “rich” or “poor” your neighborhood is. That’s really horrifyingly insane. [Everybody, go open a new tab in your browser and donate to your local food bank, now, please.] And, in a country where we should really be able to manage things better, we have this concept of a “food desert”, where there’s just crap access to places where you can get affordable, fresh foods. [Feel free to check out the USDA Food Desert Locator, to see how close you live to a food desert…we’re astonishingly close to one – where I’m astonished because we live within a 10 minute drive of four good grocery stores.]

And there’s BPA in canned tomato soup, and there’s arsenic in apple juice, and OMFG it’s time to just go back to an agrarian society because we’re just industrializing ourselves into the grave.

OKAY. TIME TO GET IT TOGETHER AGAIN.

There’s a point at which you kind of have to accept that you can’t be everything to everybody. Similarly, there’s only so much you can buy if you don’t have unlimited sums of cash. And, you can’t do everything you want to do without unlimited time. These are all just truths. It’s just how it is. That doesn’t mean you can’t strive to be a good person in all that you do, that you can’t try to squeeze the best value out of your budget, and that you can’t be efficient with your time so that you can do as many of the things you want as possible. But it DOES mean that some trade-offs are required. For me, that includes knowing that I’m not always doing exactly what I wish I could be doing in my kitchen. We did bake a ton over the long weekend last week – and that was great. But I have squash sitting in my fridge, taking up serious space, plaintively crying out, When will you eat us?! I will get to you my pretties, just give me time.

Patience, in all things. Gotta be better about that myself.

More on week 2 and week 3 of the CSA later. And now…off to take dd to a playdate down the street.