Make Life Easier with Your Crockpot

Make Life Easier Monday

The crockpot or slow cooker is a great asset in a kitchen. With a busy schedule the crockpot makes a home cooked meal possible. The crockpot comes in handy when you don’t want to heat up your house with a hot stove or oven. The crockpot makes my life easier with heating frozen leftovers or cooking a hot meal.

One discovery I’ve made with my crockpot is how easy it is to make broths. A few weeks ago, I did a post about my recipe and technique for homemade chicken broth. The crockpot makes it super simple for cooking broths, which I love to freeze and have on hand for other recipes.

My crockpot, also, gets lots of use during the summer months when I have an abundance of garden fresh tomatoes from my parents’ garden. Several years ago, I had that ‘aha’ moment that I could use my crockpot to cook my spaghetti sauce rather stand over a hot stove. It transformed my food storage process.

The crockpot makes spaghetti sauce simple to make.

After an hour or two, the tomatoes and other ingredients are cooked, I used my immersion blender to blend everything smooth and then let it simmer in the crockpot for several hours.

I use my crockpot for several canning and freezing recipes such as my spaghetti sauce, sloppy joe sauce, apple butter and broths. I use it for soups and stews. It’s a great option for making apple cider and keeping it hot.

Hamilton Beach – Limited Deal at Amazon – $31.82 Prime

This Hamilton Beach slow cooker is a great deal right now at Amazon. Regularly priced at $40.34 it’s marked down to $31.82. This is similar to one of my slow cookers but this is a newer model and with lots more features. If I had the room to store this, I would be ordering me one. I love my Hamilton Beach slow cooker because it can be sealed making transporting things great.

I love this crock-pot slow cooker. It’s what I use to make spaghetti sauce. It’s large 8 quarts allows me to make a large batch of spaghetti sauce at one time. it doesn’t seal tight which is great for simmering sauces that I need to have thicken. It is my go to for all my tomato sauce recipes and apple butter.

Love this tool and it also transformed making spaghetti sauce. After I’ve let the tomatoes cook in the crockpot, I grab my immersion blender, blend for a couple of minutes and I’m done. Let the sauce simmer for several hours, cool it and freeze. If there is an easier to freeze or can homemade spaghetti sauce, I don’t know it. This allows me to have homemade, ready-made sauce year round for my family.

Do you have a favorite crockpot recipe? Be sure to like and comment and let me know your thoughts.