This soup was inspired by a pile of turnips at the produce markets last week. Hmmm, I've never bought a turnip... I'll make soup! This meal worked well for working day today. Last night I enlisted my daughter to help chop potatoes, carrots, onions, garlic, celery and the beautifully purple-tipped turnip. This morning I added a can of tomatoes, several beef stock cubes, about 200 g stewing beef and 1/2 cup barley. About 2 litres of boiling water from the kettle were poured over and the slow cooker (crockpot) was set to low. After 10 hours of cooking, the texture and flavor was superb. Served with a green salad and toast.
1 comment:
Yes, I love my slow cooker and especially now that I'm working more, I think it will be useful. Somehow things end up tasting much better after cooking very slowly... the soup I made here, for instance, gets quite thick and rich and there wasn't any added oil (though perhaps the barley thickened it?)
I feel that my slow cooker is slightly too big. I bought the biggest one (5 litres) because I imagined I would use it when cooking for a big group of people. But really I use it most frequently for family meals. And a normal size of stew or curry is a little too small in it, so that it cooks much too fast. In order to cook at a very low temperature it needs to be pretty full and I don't always feel like having that much food (I only have a small freezer above my refrigerator). So my advice would be to get a MEDIUM sized one. I also find it useful to have three different temp settings: low, high (for when you're starting something later than the morning), and auto (which heats it up quickly until a pre-set temperature, then cooks at low afterwards). A see-through lid is a must as well, because especially when you're cooking at low, you want to minimise how many times you take the lid off.
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