For those of you who don't follow me on Facebook (where I already shared this), I wanted to show you what I made in my new slow cooker recently: "double-duty seitan."

Basically, I wanted to make a pot roast type meal, but with smaller chunks of seitan and I also wanted to make a large piece of seitan that I could freeze for later use. To do this, I simply cut half the batch of seitan into small chunks to simmer right in with the veggies and then I placed the remaining large piece of seitan on top of the other ingredients to let it steam-cook in the slow cooker.  When everything was cooked, I set aside the large piece to cool (and then later wrapped and froze it) and we had the rest for dinner -- with leftovers. I used the slow cooker pot roast recipe from Vegan on the Cheap.

As for the slow cooker itself, it's the Hamilton Beach model that can be used on the stovetop, which will be great if I want to saute some ingredients for a few minutes before slow cooking, or if I want to reduce liquid at the end. I've only used it a few times, so I can't give a full report, but it seems to work just fine so far.  I got it to replace my large Crockpot SmartPot, that turned out not to be so smart after all -- it never got about "warm."  The company replaced it with a new one -- that had the same defect!  So I decided to switch to Hamilton Beach (I have a 4-quart Hamilton Beach forever that I love).

Not sure what's up with the SmartPot -- several of the recipe testers for my upcoming slow cooker book have them and they work fine.  I too had one that worked great for many years until the insert got a hairline crack in the bottom and I had to replace it.  It went downhill from there.

What kind of slow cooker do you have?  Does it have any "quirks" or does it do the job well?

Labels: slow cooker