Customer Reviews

Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Recipes for Entertaining (NYM Series)

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

I was in the typical - meat, can of soup - maybe some wine, veggies ..mode of crockpot cooking. The food usually came out 'ok', but not rave material.
I was amazed at the variations offered in this book. It's just like cooking a gourmet meal, but p.s. you put it in the crockpot. And trust me - you won't use the recipes just for entertaining - they are too good not to use everyday.
The recipes were so inspiring, I even justified splurging on a new crockpot.

My GF and I tried 2 other cookbooks with bland results. We happened upon this book and decided it was going to be our last attempt with a slow cooker if the results werent ok. The first thing we tried was the Family Style Winter Tomato Sauce. It was the best Marinara type sauce I have ever had! We loved it so much we made it a month later as well before trying something else.

Next we tried the Coconut Mango Chicken, and that too was unbelievable! Some friends didnt believe it wasnt carryout when they tried it.

Some have more prep work that others, but, none seem too difficult. This book is well worth the investment, especially used.

This is a great cookbook. A friend used it for one of our book club dinners and I raced out to buy it afterwards. This past winter I left this open on my counter and cooked from it every week. Several friends took the plunge to buy a slow cooker after seeing this book and hear me describe the easy and delicious meals.

This may a wonderfuk cookbook, but in the Kindle version there's no way to tell. Some pages are so garbled as to be indecipherable. So even though they're giving it away as a free download, it's still a waste of your Kindle's battery to bother downloading it.

I got this book as a book to put on my new KINDLE. I like the book very much and am hoping it will inspire me to use my crock pot more than I do. It works on the Kindle as it is easy to access the Table of Contents and go directly to the recipe from there. I can also make notes about the recipe on that page so that I will remember next time if I have cooked that item before and how it came out.

Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Recipes for Entertaining

I recently downloaded this cookbook to my Kindle, and found it was too cumbersome to be useful. So today I downloaded the Kindle for PC application, and then put this cookbook onto the computer. It works fine now! I have not yet tried any of the recipes, but I plan to do so soon.

I use slow cookers frequently, usually for the same recipes over and over again. I have a couple of cookbooks specifically for crock pot cooking, but find them boring and dull. This book is full of interesting and very unique one pot dishes that I have already highlighted and noted for this weekend's cooking. It is easy to read, informative, and, well, free on my Kindle. Definitely worth checking out. If you've never used a slow cooker (a/k/a crock pot) you are missing out on some great food that is so easy to make.

This cookbook is an amazing value. I find it quite easy to navigate using the table of contents. It's not scrambled up at all--at least on my kindle. The recipes are unique and a long step beyond the usual boring slow cooker recipes--just what I've been trying to find for some time! There are lots of tasty new recipe combos in the book. Love it! Now I want the other "Not Your Mother's" cookbooks.

I'm an intermediate cook and have used a slow cooker for over six years with great success. My standard of excellence for slow cooking recipes is Lynn Alley's The Gourmet Slow Cooker: Volume II, Regional Comfort-Food Classics whose praises I've sung in a Review of that book here on Amazon. (I was less impressed with her first volume The Gourmet Slow Cooker: Simple and Sophisticated Meals from Around the World, and have pulled my Review.)

I have used both the soft cover and the Kindle versions of Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Recipes for Entertaining, and like the basic text very much, not as good as Alley's, but still very good. The introductory materials are very good as an introduction to using slow cookers with many appropriate warnings and hints for the novice and improving cooks.

(Although it's not a problem for me -- my slow cooked dishes pretty much look like what they want to in my world -- there are no photographs or drawings in either version of this book. Some people may consider this a drawback; certainly the photographs in Alley's book are splendid and mouth watering.)

Weaknesses in the paper version include a complete lack of nutritional information on the dishes and a number of recipes that start in the middle of a page and run onto another page, often the other side of the first page.

The Kindle version suffers from both problems, although one can force all recipes to begin at the top of a page by using the table of contents as a link. It is also tedious to use the Index to find particular entries; one can use the search function, of course, but it would be much better if Index entries were linked to the pages of the text.

A few other general comments on using the Kindle for cooking. I've found that using the Kindle to cook with and the Kindle app on my cell phone works pretty well.

One big positive: you can take the Kindle or your cell phone to the store and use it to find ingredients -- if there is a special, it is very handy to have an easy source to find other ingredients to make the dish. You can also make a shopping list using the note function while reading recipes; the last time I took out my Kindle to check my shopping list, I gained an instant audience of other shoppers.

It's easy to keep a Kindle clean while cooking; put it in a one gallon Ziplock bag, and close the sealer top. Easy to read and use the keys and no spices, flour or flying oil or water to muck up the electronics. (This works for reading in the bathtub as well.)

One caution: I've trained myself to never try to catch anything that falls in the kitchen. The CIA instructors emphasized that trying to catch a falling knife is fraught in too many ways to mention. So be very careful to keep your Kindle in a safe location; I use a tripod like device that holds cookbooks open. My son gave me a Bartelt Cookbook Stand which works as well for a Kindle as for a paper book.

There are real negatives with using the Kindle when cooking. As Paul Biba wrote on his blog:

"When using a cookbook one likes to flip through it browsing for recipes. You look at one, go back and compare it to another, maybe find a third and see if you can't combine the ingredients of one or more of the others you've seen. You compare ingredients on hand with the recipe and change recipes if you don't have some particular important ingredient and want to make something right now. You simply can't do this flipping back and forth with an ebook. The screen delay is too long, you don't know, and certainly can't remember, what the other recipes are. Going back and forth from the table of contents to the index is a time-consuming process."

With a simple one dish meal like many of the slow cooker recipes in this book Kindle works better. But even here, I found it very helpful to check the front matter when prepping ingredients, and then looking through other recipes to get ideas for seasonings and perhaps side dishes.

The Kindle cooking experience would be greatly improved if you could toggle between two or more pages of a book. That way you could compare two different recipes for the same basic dish, or between a recipe and the front matter dealing with specific techniques, for example. I'm experimenting with creating notes and/or bookmarks to see if that would work with this cookbook. More anon!

I give the hard copy of this book four stars and at this stage of my cooking experience, three stars for the Kindle version. Since Amazon gave the Kindle version to me free, I'll give the whole shebang four stars.

Robert C. Ross 2009

I got this book for my new kindle...it was free and I had just bought a new slow cooker. Haven't had a slow cooker for many years and needed some new ideas of how to use it and found the recipes to be simple, using pantry type items, and were easy to prepare. This book has a lot of great information, tips, and recipes for using today's slow cookers. Never thought of using a slow cooker to cook wings, ribs, or cakes! Only problem I have is the difficulty of looking up specific recipes. But that is probably a new kindle owner issue....certainly no fault of the cookbook.
If you are new to slow cookers or are just looking for some new recipes to use in the one you have, this book is certainly worth the read.