Rachel HermanReseñas

It is hard to go wrong with recipes for the slow-cooker!Almost all are very edible, and some are excellent.

This is a pretty basic cookbook in terms of the recipes. If you are already doing slow cooking and have a trusted recipe source or 2, you won't really need this one. Where the recipes are complete, they are basic.

Note that yield is never specified, so upon embarking, one has to guess how many servings the recipe makes. This is a pretty serious omission! A reader can guess- but knowing whether this recipe was making a meal for 4-6, or 2, or 8-10 is very helpful when planning meals and shopping.

The basic recipes have oddities: really- a HALF can of cooked white beans? It would have been trivial to double the recipe. And as far as I know, "jar" is not a volume amount; I personally have jars ranging from a half cup through a gallon.

And then there are mistakes. The recipe for sauteed mushrooms calls for 1 cup of sliced mushrooms, 1 cup of slices portobella mushrooms- and an additional cup of generic mushrooms that are not treated differently. So- 2 or 3 total cups of mushrooms? (Besides, this is a silly use for a slow cooker!) The recipe for "Slow Cooker Casserole" lists in the ingredients, one right after the other "1.5 cup peas, frozen" and then "1.5 cups sweet peas". And "Slow Cooker Chicken with Black Beans and Cream Cheese" utterly omits both the cream cheese and the black beans. I expect thtere were other issues with other recipes, but these were one ones I happened to catch as I red through the cookbook.

I would be reluctant to recommend this simply because of the lack of information on approximate expected yield. I find that very handy as I am planning a week's worth of menus for my family and guests. The errors in some of the recipes themselves also decreases my confidence about successfully cooking from them. I am also not convinced that recipes that are comfortable with "cream of X" soup concentrate are necessarily "healthy".

Not recommended. There are a huge number of slow cooker cookbooks available; no one needs one that omits important information, and has apparent errors in the ingredients, especially since this book covers mostly the tried-and-true basics of slow cooker recipes.½