Real Women Eat....Recipes from the Crock Pot Cookbook!

Results from our "Cook -n- Critique" evening...

Cupcake here....reporting on the "Crock Pot Recipe Collection" cookbook. We all gathered at SweetJeanette's home to eat and critique! I think I should preface this with a little explanation....all of the members of the Real Women Eat club are FABULOUS cooks and we love us a good cookbook, so we decided to try out crock pot recipes to start.

Warm, comforting and easy was the idea behind crock pot cooking but as you will read, it was not what we got! Even before we began tasting, there were looks of dismay on all of our faces...uh-oh! The menu was: Appetizers - Artichoke and Nacho Cheese Dip (pg.9), Bacon Wrapped Fingerling Potatoes with Thyme (pg. 25);Side Dish-Sweet Spiced Sweet Potatoes (pg. 349); Main Entree - Stuffed Chicken Breasts; and Dessert - Peaches and Cream Melange (pg. 460).

We dove in, uninhibited and unafraid of the culinary masterpieces before us.....I will let the ladies give there personal critiques but overall here are some snippets of what was said. "Too much effort, not easy recipes like a crock pot should be", "not enough pictures", "this dessert looks like poo, lets call it The Mange instead of Melange". Are you starting to get the idea? Out of the 5 Spoons possible, it earned a 1! In fact SweetJeanettes mother was in attendance to help give critique (now this is a good southern woman who would never hurt any ones feelings and even calls ugly babies "precious"...you know the type) suggested we just do salads next meeting! Ha! The only winners of the night were the Nacho Cheese dip (good but really unoriginal, one member stated you could just melt Velveeta and mix in a can of Rotel tomatoes and get the same thing) and the Fingerling Potatoes with Bacon (needed lots of salt, and what isn't good with bacon). The BIG loser of the night was my personal dish...Dessert!

The Melange (or mange), was the strangest consistency and tasted like, well it didn't taste at all. Prep was easy, but the cook time was way off (6 - 8 hrs. on low) and the bottom of my dish was burnt!

The rest of the ladies will chime in with their individual ideas but as for Cupcake this cookbook was NOT worth the $20 spent on it or the less than average dishes that came out of it!

So, sorry to the publisher...We give this cookbook a 1 spoon and as one contributor put it..."the little pamphlet that came with our crockpot had better recipes".