My Crock Pot, My Friend

I am not an amazing cook. I'm not a "foodie." I often wish I was, but I'm just not. I buy whatever olive oil is on sale. My favorite cheese is string cheese. The spice I use most often is Lawry's seasoning salt. I have a great zester, but I only use it once or twice a year.

But the thing is... I have to cook. I have to cook a lot. I live in a small, beautiful town where none of the restaurants are conversant in gluten free cooking. For now, my husband eight hundred miles away. So, foodie or not, I cook a whole lot.

I cook when I can, and I eat what tastes good, what's fast, and what won't make me sick for days (i.e. wheat, rye, barley, and their friends).

Enter: my crock pot. 

I've played with it a bit since moving back to Wisconsin, but my creativity is pretty low. I make soup, mostly. Or I cook a big piece of meat with some broth, potatoes, carrots, and rosemary. It's not bad, but it's... boring.

Enter: author and blogger Stephanie O'Dea.

I met her over at the book table at the Gluten Free Expo, and I totally fell in love with her spunkiness, her honesty, and her cookbook.

"People occasionally ask me if I'm a chef," she said, laughing. "I tell them definitely not." Her ingredients are simple and her method is singular: She cooks, every day, in her crock pot.

When her daughter was diagnosed with Celiac, Stephanie realized that she had to adapt her cooking. As a busy mom, she didn't have time to do anything fancy. So she challenged herself to use her crock pot every day for an entire year. You can read of her year of crock pot-ness over at A Year of Slow Cooking.

Stephanie's recipes are easy. They take common ingredients like honey, ketchup, broth, and simple spices. They are fast, with most taking only 10-15 minutes of prep. They are affordable, with the book divided into sections for meals under $7, under $10, and under $15 (to feed a family of four).

I purchased her More Make it Fast, Cook it Slow book, and I'm one recipe in. My mom and I tried out her Green Pepper chicken a few days ago.

We only had to buy a few ingredients (green chiles, an onion, two green peppers), because the ingredients were simple enough that I had almost everything on hand. This pretty much never happens to me with recipes, so I was already a fan of this one.

We threw the ingredients in before I left for church in the morning, and by noon it was almost ready.

 We served it with some (gf!) Mission tortilla chips and sprinkled it with (gf!) Kraft cheese.

The verdict?

 

Yum! It needed a touch more heat, so we added a bit of hot pepper sauce to the mix. 

After that it was perfect, especially when paired with  Mexican Coke. Have you tried Mexican Coke? It's made differently in Mexico than it is in the U.S. (no high fructose corn syrup, for one thing), and some of our California friends turned us on to how tasty it is. Perfect for a dish with some green chiles!

So far I'm loving this cookbook. It's definitely the kid of cooking I can definitely get behind. Fast, affordable, easy, delicious.

Now what to make next?