I don’t like cooking

That’s a lie. I don’t like cooking often. When I can find the spoons to cook, I enjoy the process. But I don’t find it comes easy to cook often. So - Batch cooking came pretty naturally to me. It’s not that much harder to make 8-12 portions of many meals than just 1 or 2. It can be a bit hectic to make 6 Litres of chilli or something, eat, portion the rest into tupperware, and then clean up everything though. And that’s where the slow cooker swoops in.

I have one of those Ninja Foodi 8-in-1 air fryer things (clearly). It’s great, 10/10 appliance. One of its many tricks is Slow cooking. Some staples:

• Beef Stew. Get a joint of Brisket or whatever, Sear the outsite, roll it around in salt and black pepper. Chuck in the pot with a couple chopped onions, carrots, mushrooms, and some good brown ale, cook for 8-16 hours. yes, hours, we’re slow cooking. Make it on saturday afternoon and eat it all of next week. Delicious.
• As mentioned, Chilli. I make a vegetetarian bean chilli, but you can do what you want. Similar story, cut everything up, chuck in the pot, plenty of fluid (cheap red wine does the trick here), cook for as long as you want (8+ hrs).
• Ragout. A bit more prep, in that you’re supposed to heat and cool it a few times to get everything to turn to mush properly. Nothing 14 hours of blasting it on high in the slow cooker can’t fix.

All of this generally only ends up creating a little mess, one chopping board, the the knife, a peeler if I used potatoes, and a wooden spoon or spatula. The big pot will wash out tomorrow after spending all night cooking. Much more manageable. I wake up to a house that smells of delicious food and come home to a feast ready to eat.

There’s more to it though. I don’t think you can get a slow cooked meal wrong. Like, sure, you could have added a little more of this or a little less of that, maybe the celery was a bad idea (fuck celery, all my homies hate celery). But after 12 hours simmering away in a pot, everything just kinda disintegrates into delicious mush. Meat will melt and pull apart, root veg will become entirely soft, and the flavour of the dish will permeate everything.

It really does feel like cheating. But I’m playing to win (eat tasty food for reasonable cost), not for sport (doing the cooking).

Get a slow cooker. Ideally a magic multicooker if you can afford, they’re great. Mine even makes yoghurt!