OMG well talk about being brought back to reality. The "love-it"s still have it by a whisker but I can see that there actually are two sides to this story. Thanks everyone for the replies, I'll try and pick out a couple and reply to them.
I can't even remember how I got my first one. My mother used to make all sorts of things in it, in particular corned beef. I think I asked my mother for one for xmas or birthday when I was about 21 and of course she was all enthusiastic about that (lol@ mothers!) and the rest is history. First recipe I made was Irish Stew, followed by Apricot Chicken. When I moved to Japan it was one of the first things I sought out to buy (and trust me it wasn't easy back then).
Agree with everyone who said that it's handy as an extra portable/space-saving element in the kitchen when cooking up a massive meal. Particularly useful for those of us who don't have a massive industrial-size kitchen with 6-burner stovetop.
Good to see some very creative uses here (soap!) I've made a soup for ramen in it from pork neck, that's about as creative as I get
And I'm not the only person who makes curry in the crock pot! Yellow Thai curry is my go-to (I throw in about 2 pounds of bone-in ribs - yum), but I've done Indian curries and just added the spices or rue towards the end.
Tris Prior - I'm surprised that you find the recipes are bland as my experience has been the opposite. Cooking at low heat over a period I find you tend to lose a lot less flavour from the herbs/spices, and if I put the same amount as for the same meal in a pot on the stove then it'll be almost overpowering in flavour.
For cooking beans it's brilliant.
For everything else, it's shiite.
+1
Also, stinks up the whole house.
LOL each to their own I guess. When I was a bachelor this was one of the things that I loved about it, coming home after a hard day's work and being able to smell dinner from down the hallway.
We use ours every week.
Beans, chili, roasts, pulled pork, soups, curry, stews . . . so fricking awesome. Plus you can usually use the cheaper cuts of meat because they come out so tender and yummy.
Not just meat but vegetables that you discover at the back of the fridge too (YMMV). If I was making stock from Friday night's BBQ chicken carcass then the dried out carrot or half an onion from last week would also find their way into the mix, pending "smell test."
And sinewy cuts are made for the slow cooker, 'nuff said.
We have an electric mutli-cooker (InstantPot). We use it almost daily. You can saute/sear in it directly before slow-cooking. It is thermostatically controlled and heats fast - this can eliminate a lot of the mushiness problems of old-style crock pots. And with the pressure cooker function, a frozen roast is tender (and cooked) throughout in under and hour.
I put ours on the Kill-A-Watt meter, and it costs us about $0.04 for the first half-hour and $0.01 for each hour to run thereafter to slow-cook with a full load. This is at $0.16/kWh. This is much more economical to run than the stove top or *gasp* the oven.
I heard of these mythical appliances back before Web 2.0 but have never read a review - thanks for yours. My concern of course is that it doesn't do any one of the functions well but it sounds like that's not the case.
Regarding quality / taste, IMO most "good" slow cooker recipes will be designed such that they're impossible to overcook. Braised meats, for example, tend to just keep getting better the longer you cook them (within reason).
Agree!
As per a couple of the other commenters my current one has a timer that switches it to a "keep warm" setting once the preset cooking time elapses, but my old one didn't and I'd regularly leave it on "low" while I was out of the house for 12 hours at a time.
Mine is a stupid piece of garbage. It only has two settings: too high and too low. Too low is a lot like off, whereas too high burns everything on the bottom solid black and causes it too boil over, thereby running over the uninsulated sides evaporating and eventually burning on the way down, and leaving a large puddle of crap on the counter. It is also way too small. I figured at that point I should just use my electric stove, because I can control the temperature and choose the appropriate pot size. I now have one less pointless electronic device laying around.
LOL for what it's worth it sounds to me like it could have been a problem with the actual crock pot. I've had the "overflow" problem before but that has always been my own fault. The only thing I have burnt in the slow cooker is lasagne and something else that had a low amount of liquid, can't remember what exactly. Anyway, congratulations on clearing the clutter, it's a constant battle.