Good Housekeeping’s “Slow Cooker”

I lost my crock-pot in my divorce in 2009, and to be honest I was not that torn up about it. This particular slow cooker was expensive, big and bulky. I knew it would take up a lot of space in my new, sleek, single-girl apartment so I willingly said to Bill, “Take the crock-pot. It’s yours.” He was moving into a big house in West Portal and was happy to take it with him. To be honest I think he took it in the box it came in because we hardly ever used it. Flash forward to 2016 when I get married again. This fact still baffles me because after I survived my divorce I vowed never to marry again. But I am a romantic, and each time Jeff and I talked about not getting married, I secretly prayed he would one day ask me. On my 51st birthday in Hawaii, he asked me to marry him and I said yes before he could even complete the sentence. When we got married in the summer of 2016 at Terrapin Crossroads, I started thinking about a crock-pot again. Although this seemed very impractical because we spend half our time in San Rafael and the other half in San Francisco. In the city, we often eat out on Clement Street, and in Marin we entertain ourselves by assembling meals from Good Eggs. But still the crock-pot was calling my name. I bought one and it sat in our garage for about six months. I looked at it like an unwelcomed house guest. “What are you still doing here?” Finally, the tide turned when my step-daughters bought me this book, “Slow Cooker,” for Christmas. This cookbook, filled with pictures of the finished meals, provided me with a road map and beacon of inspiration. Jeff and I made our first crock-pot meal last week, and invited his daughter Violet to be our first taste tester. It was a deconstructed chicken pot pie, and we all declared it to be a winner. I look forward to more crock-pot meals ahead, and a very long marriage with this wonderful man, too. To purchase this book on Amazon click here.