Slow Cooker: The Best Cookbook Ever with More Than 400 Easy-to-Make Recipes [Paperback]

Diane Phillips (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 25, 2009

This is the only slow cooker book for busy people. With over 400 recipes, The Best Slow Cooker Cookbook Ever saves time and money week after week with easy meals that keep one eating well at home every day. From Old-Fashioned Chicken Pot Pie to Mexican Hot Chocolate Lava Cake, this cookbook contains recipes for everything from soups and roasts to cobblers and puddings, inspiring night after night of great meals. Prep a few ingredients, toss them in the pot, and let the cooker work its magic while you're gone for the day. Return to a slow-cooked, deeply flavored, great-smelling dinner for you and your familyevery night!

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Diane Phillips is a cooking teacher and author of more than 14 cookbooks. Her home is in San Diego, California.

James Baigrie is a New York-based photographer.

Product Details

• Paperback: 544 pages
• Publisher: Chronicle Books (November 25, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811866572
• ISBN-13: 978-0811866576
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 7.6 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (66 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #18,802 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #71 in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Special Appliances
  • #75 in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Culinary Arts & Techniques

More About the Author

Welcome to my Amazon.com profile page. I'm the author of 14 cookbooks including the James Beard Award nominated Perfect Party Food. I travel and teach do-ahead entertaining and cooking classes all over the country and in the Dordogne region of France. Teaching is my passion and I love being able to do something that I love that includes meeting my readers and students all over the country. Check out my website www.dianephillips.com for my fall class schedule featuring my next book: Slow Cooker; The Best Cookbook Ever, information about La Combe en Perigord, travel tips, and do-ahead entertaining tools. Follow me at my blog: www.cucinadivina.blogspot.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

77 of 78 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Nice book, but not as helpful as I'd hoped, November 23, 2009

By 

Aderyn (Small-Town Michigan, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Slow Cooker: The Best Cookbook Ever with More Than 400 Easy-to-Make Recipes (Paperback)

(What's this?)

"Slow Cooker: The Best Cookbook Ever" has many excellent recipes and meal ideas, is well laid out, clear, and nicely photographed. Whether it will prove to be the "best cookbook ever" for you probably depends on how you use your slow cooker. I usually turn to mine on busy days when I have little time to cook and will be gone most of the day. I want to quickly combine a few ingredients with minimal fuss, clap the lid on, walk away, and come home eight or ten hours later to a ready-to-eat meal. Unfortunately, many of the recipes in this book require extensive preparation, cook for only three or four hours, and involve the slow cooker almost incidentally.

For example, the Asian Honey Wings, although they sound delicious, are all but finished before the slow cooker even makes an appearance. The wings are cooked in the oven while the sauce is prepared in a bowl, and the sauce and wings are then combined in the slow cooker and heated through. The book suggests serving them from the slow cooker to keep them warm. Heating and serving an already cooked dish from a slow cooker hardly qualifies as a slow-cooker recipe, and I don't really need a book to know that serving from a slow cooker is a good way to keep food warm.

Another typical example is a casserole for which the cook must first make 2 cups of cooked rice; chop several vegetables; have 3 cups of cooked, diced chicken at hand; and grate 2-1/2 cups of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. While the rice simmers on the stovetop, the cook sautés the vegetables in separate steps, then removes them to a bowl and adds several more ingredients to the pan to create a sauce. The rice and some of the vegetables are then combined with half the sauce in one bowl, and the chicken and other vegetables are combined with the rest of the sauce in another bowl. Finally, the rice, chicken, vegetables, and cheese are layered in the slow cooker and heated through. Frankly, if I have time for this level of involvement and kitchen mess, I'm just going to go ahead and cook a meal. Once again, the slow cooker seems to be involved only so this can be called a slow-cooker recipe.

A recipe for enchiladas calls for 17 different ingredients and 10 cooking steps before it is ready for the slow cooker - and then cooks only 3 hours. The cook can neither save time by using the slow cooker nor leave it unattended for the day.

There are some interesting suggestions, such as making snack mix or spiced nuts in the slow cooker in a way that is much simpler than the usual oven recipes. There are good dip recipes; again, no surprise that a slow cooker works well for warm dips, but new ideas for dips are always welcome.

I find myself using this cookbook as more of an idea book than a slow cooker reference. Leafing through, I find a recipe for something I like - cabbage rolls, say - see that it's just as much work as making them in the oven, and decide to make them soon - in the oven. One more thing: All of the recipes are sized for 6 to 10 servings; if you need to adjust the recipe to make fewer, that will add one more step.

44 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Elegant Peasant cook loves it, a best buy book, September 24, 2009

By 

K. M Merrill "justine" (Forest Grove, OR, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Slow Cooker: The Best Cookbook Ever with More Than 400 Easy-to-Make Recipes (Paperback)

(What's this?)

I have used slow cookers since the 70's and read a lot of slow cooker books. Most books are too simple or too complex, this one is just right. There will be lots of flavor with moderate start up time investment. I read about 50 cookbooks a year, and am a great peasant cook. I really like to cook simple great food.

This book is really an outstanding slow cooker book. The prep time is reasonable, the ingredaint lists are reasonable,,,, heavy on fancy mushrooms for flavor, the 400 recipes give you a lot of continents to play around in.

Many of these dishes could also be made in a casserole and baked faster.

I was really impressed with this book and marked 15 things to make this winter.

True, its not a diet cooker book, but I can reduce fat where I choose and substitue as needed. This is a real full flavor cookbook. Low fat is a joke anyway, I have nursed for 25 years and seen tons of fat people on low fat food.

If you only buy one slow cooker book, this should be the book.

45 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Tasty recipes but poorly designed for real kitchen use, September 23, 2009

By 

S. Cohen (California USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Slow Cooker: The Best Cookbook Ever with More Than 400 Easy-to-Make Recipes (Paperback)

(What's this?)

I love slow cooker cooking and in my opinion, the best slow cooker recipes use fresh, high quality ingredients (as opposed to lots of canned and boxed ingredients) that are easily prepped (if you have to spend 30-45 minutes prepping the dish, it stops being a convenience). The recipes in this book strike that "just right" balance for me. This book includes a huge variety of recipes using all sorts of different proteins, vegetarian entrees, side dishes, drinks, appetizers, etc. You will be hard pressed not to find several recipes that you would like to prepare right away.

I have two gripes with this book:

1. there is no nutrition info provided for the recipes. Some of the recipes are clearly not diet friendly but many of them are -- it would be nice to have the information available.

2. the print color and paper color used in this book make it very difficult to read. I like the layout -- every recipe is on one page, with the ingredients listed in one column and the prep information in another column. However, the ingredients are printed in sage green type on off white background and the prep instructions are in brown type on the same paper background. It is very difficult to read and I doubt that anyone who really uses a cookbook, in the kitchen, while preparing food, looked at this design very carefully. The best cookbooks have large, clear, easy to read instructions that can be read and re-read quickly while working in the kitchen. This book is unfortunately almost unusable to me in this respect. it's disappointing because I really like the recipes but I would find myself hesitating to cook from this particular book because of the extra work involved in just reading the recipes.