Crock Pot Cooking

I love my crock pot. I often say it was the best $12.99 I ever spent - I bought it maybe 10 years ago and have used it often to make my own soups and stews. I highly recommend anyone who's new to cooking start with a crock pot, it makes life easy and will help give you lots of options.

Anyway - tonight I tried a new recipe from a great web site I've found, Low Sodium Cooking. It's a crockpot chicken curry. I mostly stuck to the recipe - although I don't have cloves so I doubled up on the cinnamon. I have been realizing lately that I over-rely on pasta (and to a lesser degree rice) to fill out a dish, so since this curry had so much potato in it I decided to skip the added starch and didn't make rice. I just served this like a curry stew instead. And, this was my first time using a cornstarch slurry to thicken a sauce - I didn't do it very well, mixing the water and cornstarch poorly so it got really thick. In the end, I think the juices of this dish would've been just fine without it - I could taste the starchiness of the slurry. I'd skip that next time.

I took pictures, but they really don't do the dish justice... just trust me when I say smell-o-vision would be the best way to share with you how great this was. The smell of all those spices!!! I cooked the dish for about 6 hours on high, and took a nap during part of that time. Waking up to the smell of my own homemade curry was really delightful. :-)