Customer Reviews

Southern Living: Slow-Cooker Cookbook: 203 Kitchen-Tested Recipes - 80 Mouthwatering Photos! (Southern Living (Hardcover Oxmoor))

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This cookbook is absolutely wonderful! It runs circles around the Betty Crocker slow cooker cookbooks. I've tried several recipes, including the oatmeal, pulled pork, and breakfast casserole recipes, and they were all fantastic. This book contains a huge variety of recipes for everything from breakfast to dessert, but it does not scrimp on great dinner recipes. My life is so much easier now that I've re-discovered my slow cooker and this cookbook! Great variety of recipes, great pictures, and beautiful!

I want a slow cooker cook book for main course recipes, this book emphasizes side dishes, desserts, etc. and has few main course recipes that interest me. Some of the ones I looked at said to cook 9 hours on high which doesn't make sense, based on my experience with crock pots, but I did not try them so can't say if the advice is wrong. I purchased used, cheaply, but would NOT pay full price for it.

Just more dumb crock-pot recipes that rely on one packaged product after another being dumped in. Why would I want to use a whole bottle of BBQ sauce in a recipe?

Where is the book that uses fresh ingredients, mixed together in a sensible (and maybe slightly creative??) way, simmers them together in the crock pot during the course of the day, resulting in an easy - and HEALTHY - meal? This book is NOT it!

Nearly every recipe relies heavily on canned soup, processed cheese, bottled sauce, etc. Not my idea of home cooking. I'm donating this one to the library book sale.

Since I went back to working full time, I thought, "hey, what a great opportunity to really use my crockpot." So I bought this cookbook, banking on the Southern Living name. The recipes are OK, but there are way too many that require you to cook at high for 1 hour, then switch to low for 4 hours, etc. These are mostly meat dishes. Others say cook the first 5 ingredients for 3 hours, then add such & such and continue cooking for 2 more hours. Well, if I'm at work, how am I supposed to switch the temperature or add ingredients? Even the "programmable" crockpots won't let you change temps after x number of hours. And the book tells you that to avoid the temperature change, you can brown the meat first, etc. Well, when I'm trying to get ready for work and get three kids ready for school and daycare at 6:30 in the morning, what I really DON'T need is to have to precook my crockpot meal. The beauty of the thing is that you're supposed to throw everything in and let it go all day (not 4-5 hrs) and then it's done when you come home. These recipes need too much attention.

As a commuter of 80+ mi/day and someone who wants to put a good meal on the table at night, this book saves me every time! I have had it for over 3 years, I have never had a bad experience with any of the recipes in this book (which I cannot say that for my Betty Crocker Slow-Cooker Cookbook) and I still discover new treasures. Plus, we always have enough leftovers for at least one lunch--much better than cafeteria food!

The variety is excellent and there's a chapter on "Living Light" which both my husband and I have enjoyed at least as much as the full-up recipes. If you buy one cookbook, make it this one. And if you have trouble getting home in time to turn off the pot, get a Slow-Cooker with the built in timer--it's worth every pennny.

Although the recipes are lovely, too many of them (at least half!) have cooking times of 4 or 5 hours. So for the wonderful breakfast casserole, I'm supposed to get up at 4 a.m. to put it together for breakfast at 8? What were they possibly thinking? And I'm also supposed to run home from work at 2 p.m. to put dinner on for 6 p.m. that night? Huh? Maybe these recipes are supposed to appeal to folks who don't have jobs, and are free to start the meal at anytime (althought the 4 a.m. breakfast recipe still puzzles me). But are they really the folks who use slow cookers? Most of us want recipes that cook for at least 8 hours, so that we can put them on before we go to work and have them ready and waiting when we get home. Maybe someone at Southern Cooking needs a reality check.

Slow cookers aren't just for main dishes, though over the years that's what they've come to be associated with: they can offer entire meals from soup and appetizers to dessert - and SOUTHERN LIVING SLOW-COOKER COOKBOOK is here to make the most of them, using their Test Kitchen pros' experiments to produce polished, guaranteed results and original dishes not to be found in competing cookbooks. Bright color photos accompany recipes which are also labeled by type i.e. 'Comfort Food', 'Editor's Choice', and 'Company's Coming'. What's for dinner from a slow cooker? Perhaps Chicken Lasagna Florentine, Steak Soup or even Apple Crisp. Over 200 recipes are presented.

Diane C. Donovan, Editor
California Bookwatch

Although this book has a great variety of recipes that look family friendly, I was very disappointed to find that most of them include highly processed ingredients as key factors of the recipes: Smucker's caramel sauce, Russian dressing, American cheese, Coffeemate imitation creamer. Recipes also tended to be high in sugar content.

I'm pretty good at adapting recipes to accommodate my household's sugar limits and off-limits processed food restriction, but these recipes were so heavily based on those ingredients that they're almost all useless to me.

Love the recipes, the layout, and the results! Good food with little effort and less electricity.