The Slow Cooker for One

About this book

Proper dinners for one, not a week of the same stew.

You made one slow cooker recipe. Now you're eating the same stew on Thursday.

Nearly every slow cooker recipe is written for a family. Cook one for yourself and you're left with six portions of the same dinner, eaten out of duty until it's gone, or thrown away at the end of the week.

So you cut the recipe down, and that doesn't work either.

A slow cooker is designed to be half to two-thirds full. Put a single portion in a big, family-sized cooker and it overcooks: dry meat, collapsed vegetables, not much left you'd call dinner. Dividing a recipe by four won't fix it.

The Slow Cooker for One fixes it properly, by changing the pot. Each of its 28 small-batch recipes is written for a 2-quart slow cooker and sized to fill it to the right level, with simple scaling for 1½ and 2½ quarts. One person gets a proper dinner, cooked the right way, with nothing wasted. The stew on the cover is one of them: Beef Stew with Carrots and Potatoes.

Inside:

- 28 small-batch recipes: soups and broths, stews and braises, chicken, meatless pots, cook-once-eat-twice dinners, and pots you can start in the morning and leave

- Every recipe tells you what to do with the rest of the ingredient, so nothing sits in the fridge going off

- 8 ingredients or fewer, 6 steps or fewer (not counting salt and pepper)

- Plain-English slow cooker safety: thawing, beans and leftovers, written as good habits, not warnings

- Planned second meals, stored and reheated the right way, so tomorrow is a different dinner

- A chapter for readers who only have a big cooker: how to use it properly for one

- Quick-reference charts for cooker sizes and safe temperatures. This is a practical book of recipes and charts, with no food photography.

You don't need to be a confident cook, and you don't need to brown anything first. If your cooker is too big, this book tells you plainly, and shows you exactly what to do about it.

Book 2 in the Table for One series. Start with Chapter 1 and the cooker you already have.

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