One of the best features of the crock pot is how it does its job, cooking a full meal, in so little space. Unlike the oven and cook-top, the crock pot can be relegated to a corner and go about its business virtually unseen.

Cooking a meal or side dish with your crock pot also frees up your oven and cook-top for other dishes. How many times have you tried to plan a big meal and have to shuffle dishes in and out of the oven and around the burners?

Set it and forget it
The ‘set it and forget it’ crock pot method frees you up when cooking dishes that you may otherwise have to watch, stir, and keep from burning. The low cooking temperatures keep dishes simmering just right so you don’t have to worry about watching a pot boil. This low, even temperature takes the guess work out of many dishes you may have previously spent time fretting over.

Easy on the energy bill
Cooking a meal in a crock pot is also more economical when it comes to energy consumption. Heating up a crock pot, even considering the length of time, takes less energy than heating up a large oven or letting a burner stay on, radiating its heat out into the kitchen. The heating element in the crock pot is contained and is designed to heat only the insert that holds the food. You’re not spending money to heat a large space nor are you letting the heat escape into the room.

Check out our Crock Pot Store for great recipe books and slow cookers available through Amazon.com

A few things to watch
One of the downsides to crock pot cooking is there are just some ingredients that don’t work well in a slow cooker. For instance, dairy products. Making a cream or milk based dish becomes more complicated, involving extra steps and extreme caution so as not to curdle the milk.

If you’re not careful choosing and cutting up the food that goes into the crock pot, you may end up with food that’s either undercooked or overcooked. For instance, many cooks are used to coarse cutting vegetables for stew, but vegetables cook slower in the crock pot and may need to be cut finer, or cooked longer. Meat typically cooks faster than vegetables in the crock pot, making the size of the ingredients important.

Crock pot meals are best when using fresh meats and vegetables. So, if you live in an area in which you must rely more on canned foods, the texture in a crock pot will be disappointing. Because canned foods are already processed, they may become quite soft and mushy in the crock pot. Picture cooking canned peas for 8 hours, even on such a low heat. Yes, you can add the canned veggies in during the last minutes of cooking time, but if the idea is to walk away and have dinner ready when you come home, it sort of defeats the purpose.

The ultimate time saver
Because you can walk away from the meal, the crock pot becomes the ultimate time-saver in the kitchen. Once preparation is done, you have the freedom to do other chores, or even leave the house. Crock pots do the cooking part of a meal for you. So, what are you waiting for? Just set it and forget it.