by Sara Lewis, published by Hamlyn, 2008.
But my friend Roz came to stay for Christmas in 2010, bringing along her slow cooker so she could make a curry. Christmas even morning arrived and she fiddled around frying stuff and making the kitchen smell deliciously curryish. Then she just dumped everything in the slow cooker and I think she went for a long walk with her other half, who can only take so much of a houseful of girls. The curry turned out most delicious, though I did wonder at the time if it was really worth it. After all, many pans had been involved before she actually got to the stage of putting it in the slow cooker, so there was just as much work at the early stage as cooking any other thing. The curries I'd cooked took similar amounts of effort, the only difference being really that they cooked rather quicker (naturellement) and I had to stir them now and then to make sure they didn't stick.
However, the next day, Christmas Day, I was converted. The slow cooker is the ONLY way to cook Christmas pudding. Stick it in surrounded by boiling water, turn it on and leave it quietly doing away far from the mad frenzy of the rest of the Christmas dinner. It's not taking up your biggest pan or occupying a quarter of the hob or steaming up the kitchen. You don't even have to remember to top up the water. So, when I saw a slow cooker at a ridiculous price in the January sales, I had to have it, if only for once-a-year Christmas pud.
Since then, I've experimented. It is sometimes useful to be able to make something in the morning that will be ready to eat at night, and it is also possible to do it without having to go to work smelling of the onions you fired for it. Generally what I do is cook all the bits that need cooking the night before, then add hot stock in the morning when I turn it on. Sometimes I don't even add anything hot but simply turn it on. It hasn't let me down yet.
You do have to learn to go easy on the liquid and add plenty of thickening, as it doesn't reduce at all. I've yet to make a satisfactory tomato sauce in it. It's great for soup though, and any type of stew as long as you get the thickness right. The great advantage is that things tend to stay whole, so you don't end up with little shreddy bits of meat or mushy vegetables. Not all recipes take all day either. Some of the best take four or five hours, so at the weekend you can do all the preparation after you've had lunch and then when you are ready to eat it feels rather like someone else has done the cooking, which is always a bonus. The other major advantage is that it doesn't matter if you don't eat it the moment it's ready. It can sit for an hour or two quite happily, even if you forget to turn it down to 'warm'. Apparently it also used the same amount of electricity as a lightbulb, which sounds good, though I don't know how many lightbulbs' worth of electricity it would take to make the equivalent dish on the hob or in the oven.
On to this new recipe then. As I have said, just about everything I've tried has been soupy or stewy, with the exception of some steamed puddings, so this was something new for me. The great advantage was that nothing had to be pre-cooked, just anoint the salmon with pesto, throw in the veg and some wine and stock, turn it on and four hours later, there's dinner. I'd been looking for something fishy and this one struck me because I thought it might go down well with the kids. They like salmon and they like pesto; surely I had to be on to a winner with pesto-baked salmon. The littlies weren't too keen on the veg , but Elspeth was ecstatic, which more than made up for their lukewarm reaction. As for R and me, we both enjoyed it, but it wasn't a revelatory experience as some new dishes are. I'll make it again though, if only for the pure simplicity of it. And you have to admit, it looks very pretty on the plate.
