Why Slow Cooking?

For my post this week, I wanted to illustrate a bit why I decided to create this blog in the first place, but I promise that I'll be back to food blogging next week.

I hope everyone has already seen the greatness that is the PhD Comics by Jorge Cham.  He creates comics about life in graduate school, some that are scarily accurate.  He has several that demonstrate the difficulties of eating healthy in graduate school.

As you can see from the above comic (the easier to read original may be seen here), there are certain important characteristics of the "traditional" graduate student diet: caffeinated and either cheap or free.  Since the emphasis is especially on the cheap or free food, due to meagre graduate student stipends, often eating healthy is lost.  (For more of Jorge Cham's expert insight in this area, see the Law of Free Food and Ramen--which shows how to eat a balanced diet with ramen noodles.)

However, I've found the crock pot to be the ultimate solution to the cheap-food-not-being-healthy dilemma.  For an initial investment in the crock pot (a low investment too, you can get one of the fancy ones with timers and such--and I covet those for someday--but the one that I have is currently selling via Amazon for less than $20), you can make a week's worth of meals, not for less than you would spend on a week's worth of ramen noodles, but for a low cost that will fit in any graduate student budget.  With this blog, I just want to show that you can eat healthy as a graduate student!

Also, special thanks goes to my friend Ryan from my undergrad years who suggested the brilliant title for this blog.