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Did you purchase a crock pot recently? Have you seen it around? Alright, I’m one of the guilty ones who filed my crock pot under “long lost kitchen appliances” a few years back and have forgotten about it. Until recently, when my budget took a hit and I had to put in more hours at work. So, out it came, all shined up and ready to use and my family loves having actual meals on the table again.
A little heads up. If your crock pot is more than 7 or 8 years old, you’ll want to invest $30 or $40 in a new one. Crock pots have improved, and you can find models with better energy efficiency, timed starts, temperature settings by degree, warming cycles, secure lids, and a host of other features. Besides the new features, I keep reading that crock pots save money and time. How exactly does that work?
Money Saving: When you are cooking a beef stew, simmering soup or spaghetti sauce, or making a nice pot roast, you are using your appliance for long hours. If you use an oven, you are committing roughly 2500 watts to this meal. If you cook your pot roast in the oven for about 3 hours, calculated roughly, you’ll be using about 10 kWh for that meal. If you cook that same pot roast in a crock pot for about 6 hours, you’ll be committing about 200 watts, or calculated roughly again, about 1.2 kWh for the same meal. Heating up a whole oven for a pot roast doesn’t make sense when you can put it in it’s very own, personal sized oven – your crock pot. Using any of the informative energy consumption calculators on the internet, compare your own data and see if cooking with your crock pot makes sense to you.
Most crock pot recipes call for inexpensive cuts of meat. The low, slow cooking of a crock pot breaks down the sinew and connective tissue of less expensive cuts of meat. Crock pot recipes call for cooking in liquid which also tenderizes tougher cuts of meat, so you end up with meat that falls apart with a fork. A more tender cut doesn’t stand up as well to the long, slow cooking or the liquid. Opt for beef cuts like brisket, bottom round, rump roast, round steak, or even a good chuck roast. Pork shoulders and short ribs are good, too.
How does a crock pot save you money in the evening rush? You aren’t calling your husband to pick up dinner at a fast food place. You’ve prepared your dinner in the morning and popped it in the crock pot. Now you don’t have that “what are we going to do for dinner” nightmare. When the kids are coming home from school and the busy evening begins, it is not the time for figuring out something for dinner. Avoiding fast food and convenience store stops are a real money saver.
When you are air conditioning your house, the last thing you want to do is heat up your kitchen by having the oven on for a long time. During the summer, we do eat mostly cold meals, like salads, but summers can be pretty long here and my family starts to get a yearning for a nice, hot meal. Without adding a bunch of hot air to my house, I can throw a pot roast in my crock pot, and we’re all happy… and the air conditioner can do it’s normal work without stressing it out anymore than necessary.
Time Saving: How often have you made a one-pot meal on top of the stove, like a creamy soup, or thick spaghetti sauce, and you found yourself constantly checking it so it wasn’t boiling over or burning to the bottom of the pot? If you’re stirring a pot you are not saving time. And if you put a dish in the oven for a long time, like a pot roast, it doesn’t need to be watched, but you sure aren’t saving money. We don’t want to sacrifice money for time savers… we want both.
Getting my family to help with meal preparations is a big time saver in my book. If I can walk away for a few minutes while my children are scrubbing potatoes and plunking them in the crock pot, I’ve got those precious minutes to attend to another task. Getting kids involved putting a crock pot meal together is possible because there’s less danger of having someone get burned; you don’t turn on a crock pot until all the ingredients are in and you’re ready. There are many crock pot recipes available that have only a few basic ingredients, so even a cooking novice like my husband can jump right in there and cook a meal, too.
Nightly stops at the store to quick grab something to cook for dinner is a serious waste of time. Now I take one trip to the grocery store, and buy everything I need for at least three crock pot meals. I can plan several all-in-one-step meals, buy and even prep a lot of the ingredients ahead of time, and pop a meal in the crock pot in the morning. Now, we can go straight home from the soccer game… home to a hot meal!
Money and Time Saving: Using a larger crock pot yields the best returns for my family. Cooking once and eating twice is not only a time saving feature, but a money saver as well. I use an oval, 6 quart size crock pot, so that we have leftovers for lunch, which solves the problem of wasting money going out to eat. For my time and money, it makes sense to use a crock pot several times a week for our family meals.
Look at your poor crock pot just waiting for you to come to your senses, once again. I know you can do it, once you start looking through all the new recipes! Get your kitchen counter cleared off, set up your crock pot, and make out your grocery list. Now, won’t you enjoy saving all that time and money when you cook?
Grab your old slowcooker recipes, search for a few new recipes, and brush up on your slowcooker cooking methods! It’s time to get started and get serious saving money with your slowcooker.
