Slow cooker – CookeCrumbs' Blog

Running and rice pudding

This morning I went on my first run of the year.

Due to the ongoing lack of hearing from my ear infection after Christmas, I avoided running because I thought it would make me feel dizzy. However, I have actually had perfectly good hearing for a few weeks now. For the last couple of weeks I’ve been setting my alarm so that I can get up and go for a run before hubby goes to work. With the mornings getting lighter, I thought this might work, but every time I’ve switched it off and gone back to sleep. It’s so warm in bed!

This morning, however, I decided to go for it. Our alarm clock a.k.a. our son woke us both up just before 7a.m. and I thought right, I’m awake, I’ll go out for a run. During the week I’d be getting up much earlier than this to go for a run. It was already light at 7a.m. which gave me a bit of motivation to exit the toasty bed.

Until I saw it was raining and snowing outside. Hmm. After getting up and sorting out breakfast for the boys I stared longingly out of the window wanting to get my trainers on and go for a run, and then I noticed it had stopped snowing. I hadn’t eaten (I was still full from eating 3 bowls of rice pudding yesterday. More on that below…) so I suddenly announced I was going for a run, and I was gone.

It wasn’t raining too heavily and I started off really well so decided to extend my route. I ran 2.9 miles this morning rather than 2.3. I’m pretty chuffed with that, especially as it only took a few minutes longer than my usual route which, given I hadn’t run for about 2 months, isn’t bad. Perhaps I will get up earlier now that I remember how much fun it is to run!

The rice pudding. Thursday was a cold and wet day here and we had a lot of milk to use up so I thought, why not make some yummy rice pudding in the slow cooker? My recipe called for sugar which I obviously didn’t add, so it was just pudding rice, milk and vanilla extract. I made the full recipe for 6 people thinking it would be nice to eat the following day, too. The three of us had a lovely bowl each of warm rice pudding on Thursday night and the rest went in the fridge. And then into my tummy – I had a bowl for breakfast, a bowl after lunch and a bowl before bed! I just love rice pudding!

Recovery cooking

My ear infection has… cleared up! I could tell that I was on the mend when I started cooking lots of new recipes over the weekend and I was feeling much more like myself. My hearing hasn’t fully returned so I can’t get my trainers out to go for a run just yet because I still feel dizzy, but that doesn’t stop me cooking!

Here are some of the new recipes I have tried over the last few days:

– homemade naan to accompany veg curry. The bread machine did the kneading! I used wholemeal plain flour and made 3 with desiccated coconut and raisins and 2 with poppy seeds. Obviously not as good as takeaway naan but perhaps a touch healthier.

– spiced carrot and lentil soup in the slow cooker with the leftover naan. Great way to use up leftover veg (I added a pepper that was lurking at the bottom of the fridge) and you add milk after cooking so it is creamy but also helps it cool down a bit. Our son loved it.

– freezer burritos. Ok all I had to do was microwave these, but it was the first time we’d tried them. We had them with some carrot and cucumber sticks and my first attempt at homemade guacamole. I didn’t used to like avocado but I saw them on the market and thought I’d give them another chance, especially given they are really good for you!

– American-style pancakes from Davina’s book, 5 Weeks to Sugar Free. Hubby said they were better than my normal pancakes! (Book review to follow later this week)

– sugar free cookies from a friend’s blog. She’s giving the no sugar thing a whirl and is really good at creating recipes, so I keep stealing them! I used 75g oats, 25g plain puffed rice and Whole Earth 3 nut butter which I have just discovered and absolutely LOVE. I may have eaten 3 cookies within an hour…

– chocolate mousse from Deliciously Ella. I read about her blog in the January Waitrose Kitchen magazine and she has some amazing recipes. Can’t wait to try her sweet potato brownies! The chocolate mousse is made with avocado, dates and bananas. I misread 2 teaspoons for 2 tablespoons of almond butter (a bit sad about this as I don’t have much left!), just used one large banana and didn’t add the optional ingredients, just a drizzle of maple syrup. But hubby and I enjoyed them, and it made 3 rather than 2 ramekins worth, so there’s another in the fridge for tonight.

Bread maker…

I have a little secret! I have a bread maker.

After posting about making bread in our slow cooker, a friend offered me her bread maker because she wasn’t using it and was thinking about getting rid of it anyway. So I thought, why not? (Thank you!) Unfortunately I may have got a bit carried away as we don’t actually have room for such an appliance but it was delivered by some other friends on Saturday.

The reason I decided to take up the offer is that I have been using our slow cooker for meals and cakes more recently, so I haven’t actually made any bread for a while. I have lots of flour and bread mix packets which I found on sale but I haven’t used them. I’d really like to go back to making bread but with the slow cooker in use more, I’d have to do the proving and oven method. So, bread maker it is.

20141021_165401 — First loaf in the bread maker

The bread maker is smaller than I had imagined and came without a manual. It did come with a recipe book so I decided I could still give it a go. I started with a Sainsbury’s spelt flour and sunflower seed pack that I had in the cupboard. I had bought it reduced to 29p so if it failed I thought I’d feel ok about it. And I just went with whatever time was already on it, 3 hours 45 minutes. I kept checking on it because I wondered what was going on inside.

I was so excited when a loaf came out! Even if it’s a bit wonky, it’s loaf-shaped unlike the slow cooker bread I have made before. It cuts easily. But it has a hole in the bottom – I guess the manual tells you how to get the bread out without making a hole.

Anyway I was really excited, just like when I first made bread in the slow cooker. But this time I feel like I could really keep going because it’s so easy. I’ve worked out I’ll need to make another loaf for the weekend when my family visit, so they can test it too (they had a bread maker at one point but couldn’t get it to work). I’m going for another bread mix I have in the cupboard, this time a Waitrose one. I’ve found a temporary home for the bread maker and hubby doesn’t seem too unhappy with the fact that he didn’t know it was coming until it arrived. Aside from the fact that now his home for the ice cream maker he really wants has been taken up by the bread maker…

Great British Bake Off on holiday

Don’t worry, I didn’t miss The Great British Bake Off last week! We were on holiday with friends in Rye but I still watched it and watched An Extra Slice because there was so much drama that I had to find out Iain’s response. But because I was on holiday, I was on blog-holiday too.

I imagine almost everyone in the country has watched the episode by now because it was top news, so I won’t add any comments to the hundreds. Instead I thought I would share a few food stories from last week.

Remember a couple of weeks ago I made two banana and Nutella cakes to use up our bananas? One went in the freezer and the other one disappeared in a matter of days. So we took the frozen one on holiday with us. I also took the slow cooker with us – amazing idea. It was great to be able to come back to dinner after a fun day out. Definitely recommend it! I tried a new recipe out, pictured below and one night we had friends over to the house we were staying in and I made pulled pork. Brilliant way of feeding lots of people for very little and making people food happy.

20140827_191624 — Slow cooker bacon-wrapped apple BBQ chicken with green beans and mash

I tried out a new cake recipe in the slow cooker at the weekend courtesy of bakingqueen74 – chocolate and coconut cake. I made it for the same reasons, that I needed to use up the desiccated coconut from the coconut and lime cake I made a few months ago. But again I added icing. What has happened to me? It’s just icing sugar, water and desiccated coconut. It’s yummy! Sadly I only managed to take a photo once half the cake had been eaten, which happened very quickly.

20140901_084532 — Terrible photo of a yummy, demolished cake

A baking weekend

After last week’s GBBO I was desperate to try baking pinwheel biscuits because I remembered them being yummy. So I hunted around in our recipe books and attempted the only recipe for them we had.

20140816_191345 — Rather small pinwheel biscuits

They didn’t turn out quite as I had expected but they are very yummy and are disappearing very quickly. I remembered them being big and round so maybe you have to flatten them out a bit… I have found a few other recipes online which include egg so maybe I’ll try one of those next time.

I also made an apple and blackberry crumble yesterday using some of the apples from our garden and blackberries from a walk with my boys. I always use the same recipe from our Stork book but I use half flour, half oats in the crumble. It was the first crumble of the season and is quite scrummy, even without custard. And there are leftovers in the fridge!

20140817_202616 — Slow cooker red velvet cake

Finally, I made a red velvet cake in our slow cooker yesterday using this recipe. It is lovely and moist and I added some vanilla buttercream icing. Yum!

And I haven’t finished yet! Tomorrow night I’m making strawberry cheesecake cupcakes from my Hummingbird Bakery recipe book. They are really nice but, because they have fresh strawberries in them, they have to be eaten quickly. We’re going to put on weight this week.

Waitrose bread mixes

We’ve lived in two places since we were married almost 7 years ago (7 years!!), and both have had Waitrose as the closest supermarket. This was not out of choice, but it just so happens that you have to walk past a Waitrose after leaving the tube or train station to get to either of them.

Having to walk past a Waitrose to get home has its pros and cons: handy if we need to get milk or something or for picking up some reduced items at the end of the day, but it can be very tempting to buy some nicer, more expensive things too! It’s also great because they sell good own-brand Canadian very strong white flour, 1.5kg and it’s cheaper than the one they sell at our local Sainsbury’s.

Anyway, we popped in the other day to buy some of said flour, and they had an offer on their Waitrose Love Life bread mixes at 74p per pack. I bought one of each of the ones that I thought looked interesting: mixed seed malted bread mix and oat and linseed bread mix.

I made the mixed seed malted loaf in our slow cooker on Tuesday and it is so nice that today I went back and bought three more because it’s still on offer. I’m yet to make the other pack, but I also bought a couple extra of that, too. Well worth a look if you have a Waitrose nearby and fancy trying a different bread mix.

Dreaming of a bread maker?

It’s happened. After two and a half months of making my own bread in the slow cooker, yesterday I cracked.

I was kneading away and suddenly thought, wow, it would be so much easier to just use a bread maker. Yes, a bread maker.

The thing is, whilst kneading can be a very useful way of venting some of the stresses of the day, finding the 10 minutes to knead can be tricky with a small boy running around. Yes he does sleep, but after all that running around, I want to collapse too!

So yesterday I found myself imagining having a bread maker – putting the ingredients straight into the machine, switching it on and returning to a loaf of bread.

I don’t know if I’d really like to have a bread maker though. For a start, there’s no room in our kitchen for one. Also, I don’t know if it would have quite the same feeling of having made the bread yourself. I mean, all you do is put the ingredients in. Having said that, I say I’ve ‘made a cake’ when really I just mix a few ingredients together and put them in the oven. I had a quick look online and bread makers look quite expensive. It’s easier making bread in a slow cooker than by hand because, once kneaded, the slow cooker proves then bakes it so there’s no additional kneading, so I’m doing a slightly easier version already. But in a bread maker it would be even easier and the loaves come out square rather than oval, so you can cut triangle sandwiches for small boys.

I am amazed that in the last two and a half months I have only bought one loaf of bread. It hasn’t even been that hard really, I just have to make sure I remember to make the bread and find time to do it. And we’ve had a mix of breads. It was funny at the weekend when hubby wanted jam on toast and all we had was sun dried tomato and parmesan bread, though.

Maybe one day, if we move somewhere with slightly more kitchen space and I’m still making my own bread…

Closing in on the big 3-0 with more baking

I recently took another step towards turning 30. I’m now 28. I know, I know, still another two years to go. I could hardly believe it the other day when someone asked me how long I’ve been playing the piano and I could say ‘about 20 years’. How on earth am I able to say that?!

Anyway, my birthday fell quite nicely in the middle of hubby’s two weeks off work, so we took a trip to the seaside. I love going to the beach and having fish and chips and gelato. I think it’s because we don’t go to the beach very often. And it was lovely relaxing and watching the boys dig in the sand and splash in the sea. Then we stayed up late watching… You’ve Got Mail. As it was my birthday, I got to choose the film and it makes me smile every time. Hubby had made me chocolate fudge cake for my birthday cake too, so I had a week off baking… kind of.

During the last couple of weeks I have made: light wholemeal bread, rustic bread, rye bread (which our son really likes!) and I tried making up my own version of the sunflower seed spelt bread that I mentioned in a previous post. It wasn’t quite the same, but it still worked. In addition to these, I have made pizza dough to be cooked on a pizza stone in our BBQ, and pizza scrolls in the slow cooker.

This is all because hubby was off work so I had a bit more time to bake. And yet I didn’t bake anything sweet until this Sunday! I made this Raspberry Bakewell Cake to use up some raspberries. And this weekend I plan to make that yummy mango and lime cake as I finally found some big cake tin liners in Poundland.

Actually I made some ice cream, so not baking but it is sweet. I used this recipe from the BBC Food website as we had some bananas in the freezer (when our son decides he only wants half a banana and we don’t fancy eating the other half at that moment, I put the other half in the freezer to use for banana bread or something at a later date) and some buttermilk in the fridge for a recipe I didn’t get round to making. It worked a treat so I made some raspberry ice cream and some mango ‘instant’ ice cream using frozen fruit we already had and put them in the freezer for another day. One note – mango and vanilla extract do not work in this recipe. Thankfully, hubby is happy to eat it up but I think it tastes horrible!

New bread recipes

I’m still making bread in the slow cooker! I haven’t blogged about it recently but remarkably it is still happening. There have been a couple of times when we’ve had to buy bread due to illnesses and being too busy to make it myself but I am trying to keep going.

We like to rotate between a white loaf with very strong Canadian white flour, a wholemeal loaf or my father-in-law’s spelt loaf. I tried mixing things up and adding sesame seeds to a loaf but it was very dry as I didn’t think to add any extra liquid. The best loaf so far has been from a packet mix – Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference spelt and sunflower seed bread mix. Very yummy (you can taste the difference… sorry, had to be done) and fancy so it’s a special loaf. I think the sunflower seeds express oil during cooking which changes the flavour and makes the bread a bit more moist.

It would be nice to experiment a bit with ingredients. I plan to buy some sunflower seeds to try to replicate the packet mix. Recently I enjoyed a slice of bread which contained poppy seeds that a friend had made in her bread maker and that was scrummy. I’ve found a few recipes to try out on the BBC Good Food website and BakingMad.com, which even has a mocha loaf!

I also want to try making a cake in the slow cooker. There are several on Baking Queen 74’s website and I have my eye on the slow cooker mango and lime cake with lime icing recipe which I will make as soon as I get my hands on some large cake tin liners. Yummy things to come.