Tag Archives: slow cooker

Wrap It Up for the Future

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The last few weeks my husband and I have been dabbling in make-ahead wrapped foods.  I bought a pack of burrito tortillas at the local warehouse club and threw caution to the wind.  I got out my Instant Pot and cooked up some chicken breasts in barbecue sauce.  I shredded the chicken then wrapped it up in the tortillas with some cheese.  It made 9 wraps that I wrapped individually in aluminum foil and put in the freezer.  A week later I took four of them on a camping trip, heated them up on our grill (still wrapped in the foil) and had a really easy (delicious) meal!

My husband decided to tackle the rest of the tortillas last Friday and make some burritos.  He’s a better cook than I am so he made his own refried beans, rice, and seasoned ground chicken to stuff them with (along with cheese, of course!).  Amazingly, what he prepared used exactly the remaining 7 tortillas from the jumbo pack I bought.  And then we had even more already prepared food that just needed to be heated up.

Now here is where my ultimate frugal side comes into play.  This weekend we went to a pair of drive-in concerts and stayed in a hotel (because I had enough hotel reward points for a free room).  And we didn’t want to eat in restaurants because of the pandemic.  But we had burritos and chicken wraps ready to go.  So one of the things I packed for the weekend was my slow cooker.  I know…who takes their slow cooker on a hotel vacation?!?!  I do.  It’s perfect for heating up those foil wrapped burritos and chicken wraps and toasting up the tortilla a little bit in the process.  We saved the cost of eating out.  We ate food that wasn’t fried.  We didn’t have to risk Covid to eat in a restaurant.  It was the perfect choice for us at this particular time in life.

Sometimes you stumble into a good idea that’s worth keeping around.  I’ve never taken my slow cooker on a hotel outing before.  But I probably will again someday.  And I’ve never made wraps or burritos just to put in the freezer for the future.  But I likely will again…very soon!  It’s terribly convenient on those days when you don’t want to cook to just reach into the freezer and have something home cooked that just needs to be heated.  Times are weird right now…but weird times can teach us things that are useful going forward!

Corned Beef and Cabbage!

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It’s St. Patrick’s Day!  And while I have no idea whether my mixed European ancestry includes any Irish, I like to cover my bases by celebrating ALL of the holidays.

corned beef

One of my favorite St. Patrick’s traditions is the corned beef and cabbage dinner.  Now corned beef is hardly Irish.  A real Irish family would likely be making this meal with some sort of pork product.  But Irish-American immigrants in New York City found themselves looking for a cheap cut of meat that would cook up nicely with very affordable cabbage and potatoes.  And so started the tradition of corned beef and cabbage.

What is it that makes this meal so magical for me?  For starters, it’s ridiculously easy.  Cut up some potatoes and a head of cabbage.  Put it in the bottom of a slow cooker.  Put a corned beef brisket on top of it.  Pour in some liquid (I use beer, but water or stock or juice would work well too).  Turn on the slow cooker and walk away for several hours.  When you come back to it, you’ve got dinner and a house that smells delicious.

But the real magic of the corned beef and cabbage dinner is how inexpensive it is.  Corned beef is cheap meat.  But if you cook it slowly all day, it becomes very tender and delicious.  The same idea can apply to other inexpensive cuts of meat.  Throw it into your slow cooker, walk away, and come home at the end of a busy day to a delicious dinner that required almost no effort.  And there’s likely enough that you’ll have leftovers for a few future meals.

If you don’t have a slow cooker, it’s likely worth the investment.  I always see several when I go to the Goodwill store, but even new ones are not very pricey.  And for the magic of turning cheap meat into a delicious meal (or three) with almost no effort….it’s a worthwhile purchase.