Red Beans and Greens

At the end of last February, I made another vegetarian dish from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker cookbook: Red Beans and Greens. Even though I've noted several times that this cookbook has helpful suggestions on the side about which tell you which steps you can do ahead of time, since last year when I was only working on my dissertation prospectus and often not going to campus at all I just made the whole thing in the morning.

In this case, though, because the beans needed to soak overnight, I followed their suggestions and made part of it the night before and stuck it in the fridge so I could just quickly throw everything together thing the morning and just turn on the crock pot.

In this case, I cooked onions and celery in a skillet with some oil until they were soft, then added minced garlic, oregano, salt (except I skipped the salt), pepper, thyme, allspice, and bay leaves. After that cooked for about a minute, I added some of the broth and then put everything in a plastic container in the fridge for the night.

The next morning when I got up, all I had to do was add the mixture from the fridge, the beans, and some more broth.  It cooks on low for 8 to 10 hours or high for 4 to 5 hours, so I turned it on low and went off to campus.

When I returned from school in the evening, I cooked the greens, steaming them until they were cooked, then tossing them with some olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and pepper.

This is what the beans looked like when they were done cooking,

before adding anything else.

After cooking the greens, I made a mixture of paprika dissolved in boiling water that I stirred into the bean mixture and took out the bay leaves. Then I added the greens to the mixture, and ate!

This was really good and I noted on the recipe that I served it with rice. The recipe says that you should get 8 servings out of it, but I actually think I got less, maybe about 6, because even though the recipe doesn't say it, I think the author intended this to be a side dish. Regardless, it was really good and I would definitely make this again. And, if you compare the picture below, the picture almost actually looks like what I made (theirs is just less liquidy)!

So, if you had served this as a side dish, it would be 174 calories per serving for the 8 servings. However as I served it, it was 232 calories per serving plus the rice, so about 382 calories. That plus a salad is a reasonable meal for me.  It might not be for my husband, but for me that's fine. Now, I should note that I didn't use the full amount of greens that the recipe calls for, just what I had in my produce delivery, but I calculated the calories based on the recipe, not what I actually did. Now, for a side dish, this ends up being pretty pricey! $5.70 per serving for everything (but a more reasonable $2.38 per serving as I made it). Of course, if you get fewer servings out of the recipe, serving it as a main course instead, the price jumps to $7.84 per serving if you have to get everything. Of course, since I had many of the items on hand, it was only $3.17 per serving for me -- basically, I ended up getting a whole week's worth of dinners for around $20 -- and that will really stretch your stipend.

Miso-Spiked Vegetable Soup with Barley

In the beginning of February I tried out this Miso-Spiked Vegetable Soup with Barley from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker cookbook. This involved sending my husband to the international grocery store that I had just discovered (not to far from me either) to find miso because I couldn't find it on my regular shopping trip. So he brought back a giant tub of miso, but if you have to get a giant tub like we did, there are tons of things you can add miso to, as the August 2012 issue of Cooking Light pointed out.

Now, I don't know if I've mentioned this already, but my sister got me these awesome prep bowls (see image above) so now I can be like those chefs on TV who have all their ingredients already cut up when they make the recipe. Anyway, you start out this recipe by cooking onions, carrots, and celery in a skillet with some oil, adding some thyme and pepper after its been softened.

Then you add the barley and some vegetable broth. Now I think I mentioned this before, but one of the cool things about this cookbook is that it tells you what steps you can make ahead and refrigerate. So you could make the recipe up to this point the night before and then put it in the fridge overnight and cook the soup in the morning. The cookbook does note, however, that if you do that you're going to want to add some extra broth in the morning because a lot of it will have been absorbed by the barley.

Anyway, you add the vegetable-barley mixture to the crock pot. I adapted this recipe at this point a little, adding a cut up potato (see image below).  My husband had said that if we were going to have a vegetarian soup for dinner, he needed it to have some more substance to it, hence the potato.

You add the rest of the broth to the crock pot and then cook it on low for 8 hours or high for 4 hours. After it's done cooking, you stir in the green beans and miso and cook for fifteen more minutes, stirring in parsley at the end. The book also suggests you garnish it with freshly grated Parmesan, but I skipped both the parsley and the Parmesan.

This is what it looks like with the broth when you turn it on.

This is what it looks like when it's done cooking (with the green beans and miso).

Now, I've always had trouble cooking with barley in the crock pot because it basically absorbs all of the broth and you end up with mush. I wrote in the cookbook that it "turns out mushy and quickly loses its soup-like consistency." I did note that it "tastes okay," but isn't "very yummy looking." This was one of the recipes that we didn't bother finishing and just threw it out eventually. But, I think it could have been better if you made it differently (see below).

As you can see in the picture to the left, I'm convinced that whoever made the soup in this picture did not follow this recipe and/or did not even make the soup in a crock pot. There was a whole discussion in this crock pot online community about using grains in the crock pot and many people recommended adding them toward the end of cooking so they don't absorb so much of the liquid. Someone specifically said that whole (hulled) barley is best for staying firmer. I used pearled barley because that is what I already had on hand. So if I were to try this recipe again, I'd probably (a) use hulled barley or rice and (b) cook it separately and then stir it in with the green beans and miso.

Before I give you all the calculations, I left out the parsley and the Parmesan cheese because I didn't use them. Without the cheese especially, this soup is super light, even with the potato added, 190 calories for the six servings the book says you should get and 142 servings for the eight servings I think you'd actually get (without the potato, it'd be 147 and 110 calories). So this is a soup that you'd definitely want to pair with something more substantial, or make it a side dish to whatever your main meal is. If you had to purchase everything, including the potato, it'd be $5.76 per serving for the six servings and $4.32 for eight ($5.27 and $3.95 without the potato). Although that's not too bad in terms of cost, it's definitely on the higher end of the things that I've cooked in the crock pot. Of course, part of the reason I chose this recipe (as usual) is because I had most of the things I needed.  I got green beans in my produce delivery and already had the olive oil, carrots, spices, barley, and potato. So for the other ingredients that I needed, it ended up being $2.73 per serving for six servings and $2.04 for eight -- a little more friendly to my budget!

Braised Red Cabbage with Apples and Chestnuts

So... I'm back! The food in France was amazing. There was also a fresh produce stand right next to my apartment building and one block down there was a market every Sunday with fresh produce, meats, cheeses, etc.  The cheese... just wow.  While my mother was there she actually was mad about how great the produce and other things were in France... because why can't we have nice produce in the USA too? Anyway, in honor of the fact that I just spent five weeks in France, I decided to post about a recipe from my French Slow Cooker cookbook. I made this back this January as a side dish to a pork chop recipe and I've spent 30 or so minutes looking through all my cookbooks and recipe cards and I just cannot figure out what recipe I used for the pork chops. (And now, of course, my husbands going to be mad when he gets home because every single cookbook I own is on the kitchen table...)

And, on a side note, this cookbook has a recipe for Ginger Crème Brûlée that's made partly in the slow cooker -- I'd totally try it out right now except that I don't have any ramekins.

So, the Braised Red Cabbage with Apples and Chestnuts is a super easy side dish to make. You take cabbage and shred it, then put it in the slow cooker with almost all the other ingredients: chopped apple, apple cider vinegar, vegetable oil, sugar, a bay leaf, and salt and pepper (I didn't bother with salt). This cooks on low for 5 to 6 hours, but unlike most slow cooker recipes (which say to never never never open the lid), you stir the cabbage mixture occasionally. Could you make it without being around to stir?  Probably.

So this is what it looks like before it cooks (sorry about the blurry photo).

After it's done cooking, you add peeled cooked chestnuts. Now I should note that these were very difficult to find.  I think I ended up calling around until I found a grocery store that carried them. Anyway, you stir in the chestnuts and then cook it for 30 more minutes on low.

This is what it looks like when it's done.

Now, this was yummy.  I mean, really yummy. It's very sweet, so be prepared for that, but the soft cabbage with the slightly harder chestnuts and who doesn't like chestnuts around the holidays anyway? But, here's the thing about this recipe: we were eating this as a side dish forever. It says that it makes eight servings and I honestly don't remember how long we ate it, but we got at least double that. And it got really old as you got to the end -- the sweetness was awesome the first time, but a little too much on the seventh. So I would recommend making a half recipe, and then just put the other half of the cabbage in your salads for the week, or something like that. Or you could try and put less sugar in, like 1 tbsp instead of 2, and that might make it less sweet.

This is the picture from the cookbook. Not that far off, though their cabbage

looks a little more pink, while mine ended up a little more purple.

So part of the reason that I had chosen to make this was because we got apples in our produce delivery and almost everything else is a staple so I only had to buy the cabbage and the chestnuts.  So as I purchased it, it comes out to a whopping $0.81 (if you believe them on how many servings you get) or even $0.41 (if you eat it like my husband and I did). If you did have to buy everything (but the vegetable oil, sugar, and spices are staples, so unless you happened to run out of all of those at the same time, I don't know anyone who would have to buy everything), it would be $3.02 according to the cookbook serving size and $1.51 according to how I think normal people would eat it.

As for calories, this is pretty standard for a vegetable side dish: 145 calories per serving for the cookbook serving size and only 73 calories for how we ate it.  Unfortunately, I can't tell you what the whole meal was exactly because, as I said above, I cannot figure out what recipe I used for the pork but with a pork chop and a salad I'd estimate that this would end up being less than 400 calories as we ate it.  I'd recommend some rice or pasta to go with it to add a little bit more to the meal (unless you're really trying to diet).  The cookbook recommends serving it with "sausages, roast duck, pork chops, or turkey. Add some buttered egg noodles for a perfect winter meal."

Easy Swiss Steak

I took some time off from this blog over the holidays.  I didn't necessarily plan to do so, but I got really busy both because of the holidays in general and because I was trying to get the reading of the primary sources for my dissertation done before I left for the ASCH conference this past week.  I'm committing myself to this blog for the next year more than I have in the past, but I think in general I need to cut back on my posting.  I'm currently at a crucial point in my academic career: my funding for next year is contingent on my finishing my dissertation proposal by March or April of this year.  In a way, I may end up relying even more on the crock pot to make dinners for myself and my husband during this time, especially with some of the quick and easy recipes, because my time is so valuable.  But I'm planning to try to update only every other week, aiming for a Friday or Saturday update each time.  So you can come back in two weeks for a new update.

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My sister came to visit us this weekend, so I decided to make a crock pot dish.  She also has a crock pot at home, but I'm not sure how much she uses it.  Because she often works for such long hours, I think she'd really benefit from the one I have with a timer, so she can make a dish in the morning and not worry about getting home at a specific time to switch it to warm.  I decided what to make this week based on what was on sale at my local grocery store.  I saw that boneless top round steaks were on sale, so I looked through my various crock pot cookbooks to find something to do with it.  The best thing I found was several versions of "Swiss steak" in different cookbooks.  There is one in the Gourmet Slow Cooker Cookbook and one in the Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook, but the one I decided to use is in 101 Things to Do with a Slow Cooker because it was the easiest and simplest recipe and thus the best one for a grad student with limited time.

The only drawback with this is that it takes a long time to cook, so even though I went to bed kind of late because I was doing work, I had to get up by 8:00 a.m. to prepare the crock pot so it would be ready at dinner time.  The good thing about this, though, is that it is really easy to prepare and there is no chopping of vegetables that you need to do ahead of time.  You simply grease the slow cooker (I use cooking spray because that's the quickest way to do it) then throw in baby carrots.  Sorry about none of the pictures lining up with the paragraphs that talk about them.  I ended up with more pictures I wanted to include than I had paragraphs.

Then, you put the steak in.  I cut off the fat that was on the edge because, as I'm sure I've said before, the fat on meats doesn't really cook off in the slow cooker like it does on the stove or in the oven so you really want to trim as much of it off as possible.  I cut the steak into six pieces to make the dish six servings.

Then, you mix the sauce to pour over the steak.  Again, this is very easy.  You throw in one envelope of dry onion soup mix, one can of tomato sauce, and some water.  Because my husband likes things spicy (in fact, he says that he finds most of my crock pot dishes too bland, though just wait until you hear about the Indian dish I made that was too spicy for him!), I added some crushed red pepper to the sauce.  I would highly recommend the addition of the crushed red pepper.  It doesn't make it spicy, but it definitely keeps it from being too bland.  After mixing it all together, you just pour it over everything, then turn the crock pot on to cook on low for 8 to 10 hours.

This is what the dish looked like before I turned it on.

And this is what it looked like when it was finished cooking.

As you can see from the above picture, the steak cooks down a little bit in the crock pot so depending on how much you want to eat, you may want to go with the four servings instead of the three.  The cool thing about the 101 Things to Do with a Slow Cooker cookbook is that each recipe gives serving suggestions.  The "Easy Swiss Steak" says that you should serve it "over plain or garlic mashed potatoes" and "with a side of cucumber and onion marinated in vinegar."  So, to go with this dish, I made garlic mashed potatoes via the Joy of Cooking, and adapted the marinated cucumber salad recipe from the same recipe.  My marinated cucumber-onion side dish recipe is at the end of this post.  This was really tasty.  Both my sister and husband thought so.  We served it with a salad as well and my sister and I felt full with the serving in the picture plus a salad.  My husband, of course, went back for seconds on the meat and potatoes.

Overall, I'd recommend this dish for the grad student based on the number of calories and the cost per serving.  The Swiss steak alone is 311 calories per serving if you cut it into six pieces like I did, or 466 calories per serving if you cut it into four pieces.  The caveat with this calculation, however, is that the websites I use to count calories only have the steak listed by weight as cooked, but I only know what the weight is before cooking, so the actual calorie counts might be a bit lower.  For six servings, if you have to buy all the ingredients, it would be $1.92 per serving as I made it.  If you don't add the crushed red pepper, it'd be $1.55 per serving, but the crushed red pepper is a spice that we normally have on hand so I didn't need to purchase that and I actually already had the dry onion soup mix because I had used it in a prior crock pot recipe so I only paid $1.38 per serving!

However, the overall calories and cost go up if you make the marinated cucumber-onion side dish and garlic mashed potatoes to go with it.  For four servings you'd end up with 720 calories and for six servings you'd end up with 565 if you use the standard 2/3 cup serving of mashed potatoes.  If you serve yourself a smaller serving of mashed potatoes, say 1/2 cup, you'd end up with a more manageable 665 calories for four servings and 510 calories for six servings.  If you want more calories, you could be healthy and add a salad to it like we did (with balsamic vinaigrette dressing, a mixed green salad is between 100-150 calories, depending, of course, on what you put in the salad).

The total cost for this meal is a bit high if you don't already have the spices, butter, garlic, milk, etc. on hand as staples.  It would be $6.70 per serving for four servings or $5.74 per serving for six servings.  I have most of those staples on hand, however, so I only paid about $2.85 per serving for the six servings I made so it is a totally reasonable for the grad student, both in terms of calories and cost.  If you're on your own, you could basically feed your dinners for the whole week for less than $20.00!  Of course, since my husband always has seconds and I also fed my sister, the $20.00 will really only last 2 days for us.  Still: it's an easy, yummy, inexpensive dish that is perfect for the grad student lifestyle and budget.

Marinated Cucumber-Onion Side Dish
1 large cucumber, peeled and cut into thin half-slices
1 large white onion, sliced into strips
1 cup white wine vinegar
8 tsp sugar
1 tsp dried dill, or to taste
1 tsp ground black pepper, or to taste

Place the cucumber and onion in a large bowl with a cover.  In a separate small bowl, mix together the vinegar, sugar, dill and black pepper until the sugar is dissolved.  Pour the mixture over the cucumber and onion and mix everything around.  Place the cover on the bowl and refrigerate for at least one hour.  I suggest shaking the covered bowl around every once in a while before you serve it to make sure that the vinegar mix is coating the cucumber and onion evenly. Makes about 8 servings.

Soy-Sake Asparagus - Take 2

I was travelling this weekend for the wedding of one of my in-laws, so I didn't have the time to work on my blog post this weekend.  So, I thought that instead I'll just make a quick post about my second attempt at the Soy-Sake Asparagus, which I made this past Wednesday as a side dish to the "Gregory's Jamaican White Fish" that I was making from the Vera Bradley: Cooking with Friends cookbook that I received as a bridal shower gift from my aunt.

You'll recall from my last post about the Soy-Sake Asparagus that the recipe comes from the Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook.  This time, I was doing my grocery shopping at Trader Joe's and they had asparagus, but it was almost $4.00 for the bunch.  However, they also had white asparagus on sale for only $1.99 and I thought:  Hey, I've never had white asparagus.  Might as well try it out.

The recipe itself is exactly the same as in my last post, except that I was using the white asparagus instead of green.

Overall: this recipe was just as yummy as it was using green asparagus.  I think that generally I prefer the flavor of green asparagus, but this was a fun adventure, trying out something new.

Southern-Style Barbecue Green Beans with Bacon

Seriously.  "Southern-Style Barbecue Green Beans with Bacon."  Doesn't that sound like an appropriate side dish for the Fourth of July weekend?  My fiance decided that he wanted to have some of his friends from his nursing program over for a barbecue, so I volunteered to make a side dish.  I thought that I might give baked beans in the crock pot another try, but ultimately decided that green beans + bacon, cooked in barbecue sauce sounded like a good dish to feed nursing students.

This was from the Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook, which is quickly becoming one of my favorites (though thanks to bridal shower gifts and such, I now have Italian and Indian slow cooker cookbooks to try... also: how excited am I about this French slow cooker cookbook, due to be released in January 2012).  Since I was planning to go into school to the gym and to work at the library on the day of my fiance's barbecue, we were smart and prepped some of the ingredients the night before.  This recipe is actually set perfectly for a grad student: there's only four steps and if you prep it the night before, and thus eliminate one of the steps, all you have to do the day of is throw everything together in the crock pot.

As you can see from the images, the first step is to cook the bacon and then cook a chopped onion in the remnants of bacon grease.  The step that we skipped is actually the one in between those: "Grease the inside of the slow cooker with some of the bacon drippings."  I thought that it wouldn't be sanitary to leave the grease out in the slow cooker overnight and it wouldn't be smart to refrigerate the slow cooker insert itself, so I decided that since the bacon was going in and we cooked the onion in bacon grease, that would be sufficient.  I also washed all the green beans and snapped off the ends the night before, to make my life easier in the morning.

So, all I had to do when I got up in the morning was to throw the green beans and the onion/bacon mixture (I stored those in the same Tupperware container) and cover it all with barbecue sauce.  In terms of timing, this one is pretty good for an all-day, out-of-the-house cooking, though I think the beans might have been better if they hadn't cooked for as long as they did.  The recipe says to cook them on low for six to seven hours and I found the beans to be a little too limp in the end.

This is what the beans looked like after they were done cooking.

And this is what they looked like after I stirred them... much better, no?

Now, I couldn't even begin to tell you how many servings we got out of this because people just were helping themselves at the barbecue.  I made a double recipe, but a single recipe says that it serves four to six.  So, for the sake of this, let's assume that I got twelve servings total, though I'm sure we got more than that.  So, in terms of cost, I'd estimate this dish to be anywhere from $1.05-$1.25 per serving according to the number of servings estimated by the cookbook.  The range, of course, depends on how cheap certain things are, especially the bacon and the barbecue sauce.  In terms of calories, the big ticket item here is actually the barbecue sauce, making the per serving calorie count about 128.  In reality, it's probably less than that because (a) you don't eat all the barbecue sauce, just the stuff that sticks to the beans and (b) we probably ate smaller servings that the estimated.

So, how was this recipe?  Not bad.  My fiance's assessment is probably what I'm going with: this dish is more barbecue sauce than green beans in terms of taste.  I think that if I ever make it again, I may try diluting the barbecue sauce with some water, going half barbecue sauce and half just water, which may make the taste of the beans stand out a bit more.  I think I'd also probably cook it for less time, so the beans would be crisper and taste more fresh.

Crock-Baked Beets AND Pollo Colorado

Back in January, I posted about making Soy-Sake Asparagus in the crock pot.  At the end of the post, I mentioned that my friend Roopsi had given me the dual crock pot that I had been coveting.  Well, not long after making that post (January 25), I tried it out for the first time, making both a side dish (Crock-Baked Beets) and a main dish (Pollo Colorado) from the Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook.  My pair of recipes in this case might seem a little bizarre, but I was looking for two recipes that both cooked all day and both didn't take very many ingredients so I would be able to turn them on before I went to school and also wouldn't have to spend much money.  The cool thing about the dual crock pot, however, is that you can easily do two recipes that cook for different times -- you just have to be able to be home to start the second recipe whenever that is called for.

As usual, I did most of the prep work the night before.  For the beets, this meant that they had to be scrubbed and the stems trimmed to one inch.  The great thing is that I saved the beet greens and cooked them up later after I had finished the beets.  The beets only need to be wrapped in aluminum foil and then placed in the crock pot, so I wrapped them the night before, but waited until the next morning to put them in the crock pot.  For the pollo colorado (a.k.a. chicken in red chile sauce), I only had to chop some onions and peppers.  The recipe says, "If you are going to eat pollo colorado as a stew, chop the onions and peppers into 3/4-inch pieces.  If you are going to use it as an enchilada, burrito or taco filling, slice the onions and peppers."  I wasn't planning to do either of these things, so I chose to slice them, which I did the night before.

That morning, I assembled the crock pots.  The beets were easy because all I needed to do was put the beets that had been wrapped in aluminum foil into the crock pot.  For the chicken, I had to put the sliced vegetables in first.  Putting this recipe together really showed me what the one drawback to the dual crock pot is: each of the pots is only 2.5 quarts (about half the size of my 4 quart crock pot).  I started adding all the vegetables, quickly realizing that the recipe I was making was designed to be cooked in a crock pot at least the size of the red one that I have.  So, I decided to just make half the recipe, figuring that I could just make the other half once I ate all of this one.

After adding the vegetables to the pollo colorado recipe, the only other ingredients are frozen boneless, skinless chicken breast halves and a can of red chile sauce or enchilada sauce.  Now, the cool thing about the Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook is that for sauces that might be difficult to find, they often will provide a recipe for making it yourself.  I didn't do that in this case, but the book has a recipe for a basic red chile sauce just in case.

Each of these recipes was able to cook for about the same amount of time.  The beets say to cook for four to six hours on high, while the chicken was to cook for five to seven hours on low.  As you already know if you've read my blog before, I turned the crock pot on when I left the house in the morning and was able to have dinner when I got home that night -- longer than the allotted time according to the recipes, but I've never had a problem with things overcooking.

When these were done cooking, the beets took a little extra work to finish preparing because you have to take the skin off.  An especially fun task when the beets are as hot as they were coming out of the slow cooker!  Then they are sliced and can be served hot with butter or cold with salad dressing (as I did with some of the leftovers.  Overall, I feel the same way about cooking beets in the crock pot as I do about doing baked potatoes in the crock pot: It doesn't feel like the best use of time because they can be cooked quicker getting the same result.  However, there may be times when it actually is the best use of time to cook them in the crock pot.

For the chicken, the recipe says, "Cut [the chicken] into chunks if you are making a stew; slice or shred it if you are going to be filling tortillas."  As you can see from the picture to the right, I just served myself some chicken.  However, I would not recommend this.  Although this recipe would make some great burrito filling, it is too blah on its own.  Now, the pollo colorado recipe says that it serves 4-5.  I only got 4 servings out of it (after making it a second time to use up the vegetables that I had previously cut), but I also purposely selected smaller pieces of chicken because they fit better in the smaller crock pot.  The beets are supposed to serve four, but I tend to give myself big servings of vegetables, so I only got three out of it.

So, each of my servings of beets were about 105 calories and about $2.00.  That's pricey for a side dish, but I also had to search the produce aisle for the fresh beets so it's obvious that they're not all that common here.  Though, I used to buy them at the farmers' market in Berkeley, California when they were in season at a much better price.  The chicken was only about 237 calories per serving (though if you added it into a burrito, the whole dish would have more).  I paid about $4.12 per serving for the chicken dish, but the bulk of that was the large bag of frozen chicken breasts.  Since most of those were leftover I could probably cut the price for that in half in terms of actual use (making it a much more reasonable $2.87 per serving).

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I apologize for missing the blog for so many weeks.  After the semester ended, I was home visiting my parents and although I brought all the information about the recipes to update my blog, I just didn't have an opportunity!  I should be better over the summer... until August when I'm getting married. :)

Soy-Sake Asparagus

The Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook has a whole chapter on making side dishes in the slow cooker, one that I haven't really had an opportunity to take advantage of.  There are many reasons for this, the primary one being that I'd rather make a main dish or a full meal in the crock pot than just a side dish (in which case I'd still have to come home and cook.  (The second major reason is that vegetable dishes often cook faster than meat dishes, so they're not ones that you can leave on all day.)  However, the Turkey with Pecan-Cherry Stuffing that I made over Thanksgiving lasted for quite a while, such that I finished all the green beans that I had made to go with it and by early December needed to come up with another vegetable side in order to finish off the leftovers.

I was excited to try one of the side dishes in my cookbook, so I looked through the chapter and decided on Soy-Sake Asparagus, which I made on December 7.  This dish was pretty easy, but had to be made when I got home from school because it only cooks for just over an hour.  You prep the asparagus normally--cleaning it and snapping off the ends--before laying it in the crock pot.

There are very few other ingredients to be added.  Most important, of course, is the soy sauce and sake.  This dish, unfortunately, ends up not being the cheapest dish to make because of the sake.  You only need one tablespoon and in the grocery store, you can only get a full bottle.  My roommate suggested next time that I might just go to a nearby Japanese restaurant and ask if they could give me a little bit of sake instead of purchasing the whole bottle.  Has anyone ever done that when cooking with sake?

So, you drizzle on a little bit of soy sauce, sake, and olive oil, adding a pinch of brown sugar and a pinch of salt.  Obviously, I did not add any salt to my dish, especially because I figured that the soy sauce would be enough for a salty flavor.  The fun part of this recipe is that you have to toss the asparagus to coat it with all the seasonings, and the only real way to do this effectively is with your hands.  Then you cook it on high for between an hour and fifteen minutes and an hour and a half.  The cookbook suggests serving it with toasted sesame seeds as an optional garnish, but I decided not to bother with that.

This is what the asparagus looked like after being tossed.

And this is what it looked like after cooking.

According to the recipe, you're supposed to get four or five servings out of this dish.  I, unfortunately, got nowhere near that many servings, but that is possibly my fault.  I mean, this asparagus was absolutely delicious.  So I served myself generous portions and even snacked on the asparagus cold as I was putting it away and taking it out to serve each time.  The asparagus was cooked just perfectly, tender but firm.  I think in the end I had maybe three servings (not counting the snacking that I did each time).  My large servings were about 125 calories each, but the normal size serving that the recipe expects you'll have is only about 70-90 calories per serving.  I'm not going to bother to calculate the cost per serving of this dish because I'm sure that it's high because of the sake, however, this dish did include a lot of ingredients that I normally have in the house already: olive oil, soy sauce, and brown sugar.  Because of this, if you can get sake another way (as in not buying a whole bottle), this dish could actually be really cheap to make, good for the grad student budget.

Now, I started off this post explaining why I hadn't made many side dishes in my crock pot (the same could be said about desserts actually), but my problems have recently been solved.  I received a great surprise Christmas gift in the mail this week from my friend Roopsi.

The dual crock pot that I've been coveting!!!  I actually told Roopsi that I was going to make a whole post about receiving this gift, but it ended up fitting in to this post about making side dishes in the crock pot.  Now I don't have to worry anymore about using up the crock pot to make a side dish because I can make a main dish on one side and either a side dish or a dessert on the other.  The only drawback here is that each pot is smaller, so I might not be able to make a whole recipe of a main dish, but I'm still excited about it!  Stay tuned for some exciting new dual-dish posts in the future!