Customer Reviews

Southwest Slow Cooking

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Southwest Slow Cooking is an enjoyable recipe book featuring dishes meant to be slowly brought to fruitition. Each one proffers mouth-watering southwestern flavors, from Hot Artichoke Dip to Rosemary Chicken to Chile Relleno Casserole and more. Each recipe is concisely presented in a half-page or single-page, and many are illustrated in full color. Tips, tricks, and techniques such as using cheese and jicama to balance the heat when eating barbecue pork as a sandwich, also abound.

Prior to this cookbook, the slow cooker recipes that I had tried were blah and nearly indigestible. I first bought this book at Kartchner Caverns, Arizona. Every recipe (over 12) in this cookbook that I have tried has been excellent. The meals have wonderfully spicy seasoning, and they turn out the first time without needing modification. The book that I bought on Amazon was for a friend. I highly recommend this cookbook.

This is a great cookbook. Almost every recipe I have tried has been terrific. The authors are very good at combining spices. I also appreciate the fact that the recipes have been adapted to be as healthy as possible. For example, they give hints on how to roll enchiladas without frying the tortillas first. All your favorite Mexican recipes are here, adapted to the slow cooker, as well as some new ones. The authors visited a cooking school in Mexico, and it shows!

Not sure why some reviews say this cookbook doesn't provide them with authentic dishes or that there's too much post-prep.

I live in Arizona, have eaten southwest food here and in New Mexico, and compared to what restaurants serve you and what has been shared with me by folks who cook with these ingredients regularly, this book has the southwestern flavors famous in both Arizona and New Mexico. The chiles from New Mexico are the best, and here in Flagstaff we can buy boxes of whole roasted Hatch New Mexico chiles, which to me have made the difference in the way these dishes taste. We buy 50 lbs of whole roasted greens every August and freeze them, peeled or not, stems attached or removed, neither matters. I also get dried red chiles from Northern New Mexico and their flavor is spectacular. Dried red chile pods once reconstituted make fabulous dishes. You don't need canned red or green sauces if you use these. And for those who may not be able to get these products, try Penzey's Spices, they have an online store and their dried chiles rival the dried New Mexico chiles. Their Mexican Oregano is worth every penney.

As for "canned this, canned that..." comment, we all have the ability to choose and you can choose to use fresh ingredients. The ladies who put this cookbook together offer shortcuts using canned ingredients because we can't all get the fresh stuff Mexico and some of America's big cities offer. I personally have tried multiple recipes in this book and shared with lots of friends and we all agree, these are some of the best dishes any of us have ever had. The two Posole recipes are to die for. So is the green chile and so many others.

I agree there are garnishes that require work, but if you are already prepping the night before to make the dish, why not prep your garnishes as well? Having limes on hand, chopping some cilantro and cabbage and radishes and having those ready does mean you can come home to dinner. I also don't precook any of the meats where the recipe calls for it. I just turn the crock pot on high and put in the liquid and cover, then finish getting ready for work and last thing I do is dump the ingredients (from bowls prepped the night before) into the hot liquid and stir, turn to low and go!

For those who have no imagination, and have forgotten that any cookbook is an open invitation to make changes to make it your own, the way you like, changing fresh to packaged and vice versa, no cookbook will be good enough.

This cookbook has plenty of beautiful pictures to capture the cook's interest. Its strongest quality is the narrow focus on Southwestern cuisine--a welcome deviation from the ususal canned soup and chicken crock pot cookbooks. There are many flavorful, restaurant quality recipes which are clear and easy to follow. Many recipes in this book do not require browning of meat before adding it to the slow cooker. This is a plus if you want a collection of recipes that involve dumping items in the crock before running off to work. And if you host football parties and the like, some of these dishes would just be perfect for a manly, meat-loving crowd. I would describe the recipes as flavorful and not overly spicy (though if you want to kick up the heat, you can do so). I am able to make these dishes in a standard 4 quart crockpot. A few of them I think you could make in the cute little 1 1/2quart crockpots. The ingredients are not difficult to find in my grocery store. I now keep canned habanaro chilies and green chilies in my pantry. To the extent you are called upon to roast particular types of peppers, you can save prep time the next time around by roasting several peppers and freezing them. I like to plate these dishes on large serving platters, spread out grandly with a salad and a few blue corn tortilla chips, just like a fine restaurant meal.

There's a big difference between reworking ethnic cuisine and just dumping canned products and some meat into a slow cooker. Many of the recipes are make-believe southwestern: taco seasoning packets, canned enchilada sauce, bottled salsa, etc. The baked bean recipes were horrible; watery and tasteless. After several hours, I had to doctor up the beans in a separate pot and add barbecue sauce, ketchup, molasses and other ingredients just to make them edible. It takes so little time to make real Border-area food on the stove top that using a slow cooker is just a gimmick, at least for these recipes. It makes sense to use a slow cooker to feed a crowd, but look elsewhere for Southwestern flavors. If you must buy this book, try the recipes that use large pieces of meat, such as the whole chicken and pot roasts. They will be fairly well-seasoned and tender.

Like a lot of people, I use my slow cooker regularly because it means I don't have to spend a lot of time in the evening, after work, cooking from scratch. You let something spend the day cooking by itself and when you come home, it takes only a few minutes to make a salad or a side dish and then you can get down to eating. And because I'm an afficionado of Tex-Mex and New Mexican food, this nicely illustrated volume caught my eye. Well, there are a number of interesting recipes here, but very few of them were designed with slow-cooking in mind. The authors seem mostly to have taken standard dishes, like Chicken & Chile Enchiladas and Pork Adobada, and substituted a crockpot for a stove top pot. That is, after you remove the contents of the crockpot, you still often have a fair amount of work to do. That's not why I use a slow cooker. I also have to wonder why they think simply tossing in some chipotle powder makes spareribs (or whatever) "southwestern." So it's not a bad book, but neither is it what the title seems to advertise.

Southwest Slow Cooking is my husbands favorite cookbook and leisure read. He has made almost every recipe and we have enjoyed eating them. The authors have many healthful tips and great use of fresh foods and herbs. We have gifted a copy to his daughter, an avid gardener and cook. The Flagstaff Wings are the tops!

I admit that I have only tried one recipe from this book ... but I've cooked it three times now. That is their Turkey Mole recipe which boasts 11 dry ingredients (ranging from cumin to cloves to oregano to cocoa powder) and 8 additional ingredients besides the Turkey breast. This is a far cry from just "tossing in some chipotle powder".

The mole recipe does call for more than just dumping the ingredients into the crock pot and walking away. You have to brown the meat ahead of time (standard for cooking meat in a crock pot) and just before you serve it, you have to shred the meat with a fork and blend the remaining ingredients (a hand blender makes short work of blending the ingredients).

This is the BEST slow cooking recipe book out there -- especially if you like your food spicy. The recipes are easy to follow and nearly most of the ingredients are items you usually have on hand. So far, I've tried about six of the recipes, and all have been delicioso! I look forward to trying more. I highly recommend this cookbook.