Ro3bert
Assistant Cook
I've looking around for a cooking forum lately.
Well, let's begin sorta at the beginning, as with many other people my first "cooking experience" was watching/helping my mother making cookies of cake. I enjoyed mixing and finger cleaning the bowl after the dough was put onto cookie sheets or into cake pans. I don't remember the first time I made cookies but it must have been when I was young.
The next time I remember cooking was when I took a cooking class in High School. I wouldn't have taken it except it was related to a military course I also was involved with the California High School Cadet Corps, sort of a National Guard version of the military's ROTC without any chance of a military career attached.
After that cooking was an intermittent thing. Even after I married cooking was something I only did outside on a grill or occasionally over an open fire when camping.
It wasn't until I remarried and moved to the east coast that I started cooking again but that was still only occasionally. I found that I enjoyed making meals from recipes and incidentally was considered a good cook. The only thing that bothered me was the prep time and a less than stellar ability to get things done at the same time.
Well, I'm thoroughly retired now but am nearly a full time caregiver for my wife (fibromyalgia and dementia). I've really wanted to be able to prepare good nutritious meals for us but again the time spent on prep became the eight hundred pound gorilla in the room.
For some reason two or three years ago I thought it might be easier cooking with a Slow Cooker so stopped by my local Bed Bath and Beyond and arbitrarily picked up a Hamilton-Beach 6 qt with lots of bells and whistles, took it home and promptly took it up to the attic and hid it.
Last week after looking at some Slow Cooker recipes I went up and resurrected it. I'd seen a potato leek soup that appealed to both myself and my wife so I went ahead and cooked it up. In the end I wasn't overly happy with the flavor, seemed to be lacking in leek flavor as I "remembered it" but my wife was very happy with it, thought the flavor was great. I'm still not enamored with it but it is eatable.
I haven't given up on preparing more meals in it. The next I may try is a stew of some sort.
So here I am ready to interact with others on this forum though my contributions may be spotty as I am a member of a number of other forums including some health forums.
Meanwhile caio.