Budget food/living

you hungry or wut

starving, and this is testing my patience

maybe these 'slow cookers' are not for you, then?

: ]

the meet has started falling away, another hour and will then pull the meat out and debone, the cooking juices will then be reduced

i'll check back later tonight to see how your breakfast is doing!

8 hours of cooking so far...
I'm failing to see how 8 hours of energy expenditure plus reduction of juices thereafter is budget living...?

...and let's not forget the energy required and CO2 produced to farm the meat in the first place!

slow cooker runs on a very low wattage, approx that of a lightbulb

and if i dont fuck the environment someone else will

using all parts of animal rather than just eating the easy bits is better for the environment, surely?

any progress on the oxtail?

sausage and borlotti bean stew

toulouse sausages that have been sitting in my deep freeze - you know when there are bogof's in the supermarket on the decent quality sausages

veg that need finishing off - celery, carrots, spuds and a yellow pepper

browned the sausages and some smokey bacon and then softened onions in the fat they had released

everything coarsely chopped and thrown in the slow cooker with some water and tin of tomatoes

leaving for 8 hours in the slow cooker until i get back from the gym later

easy, filling, nutritious and used up a whole load of odds and ends

write a cookery book, james.

seriously.
you've posted some good recipes on here, if sometimes a little rich for my tastes.
you write eloquently and (at least when it comes to food or conflict with motorists), with real feeling.
give hugh fuckwhitington or whatever his name is a run for his money.

...all joking aside -

slow cooker runs on a very low wattage

just searched a bit around, only found models above 100W, some even over 300W.
i guess the thing does not run on full demand the whole time, but still.

if i dont fuck the environment someone else will

hahaha.
you'd get more 'bang for your buck' if you went to a floozy i guess.

The £9 tesco slow cooked is rated at 134-160W. Compared to a conventional oven that is a fairly low power consumption.

I now have enough oxtail stew for another 4 or 5 servings, overnight it has set into a savoury jelly, the fat emulsified into the cooking juices when they were cooked down, and all the meat has been removed from the bones. In the new year I will investigate beef consome recipes, the meat won't be floured in advance of cooking to help keep the liquor clear.

If I would still eat meat, I'd say that sounds nice!

134-160W. Compared to a conventional oven that is a fairly low power consumption.

That's 'fairly low' (equivalent of about five bright energy saving bulbs) consumption for, what was it, ten hours?

I don't know, I have a gas stove / oven, and even with risen gas prices I pay about six Euros a month total (and I cook every day and use the oven a lot).

Not eager to argue here, just don't understand the logic of it.

I believe it is about a 1/10 of the consumption of a normal electric oven.

Yes.

And 100/10 of the duration you need to cook your meal.

Or do I miss something here?

A smaller, lower-power device is easier to insulate and thus make more efficient?

Blah blah blah, how did the oxtail taste?

Yes.

And 100/10 of the duration you need to cook your meal.

Or do I miss something here?

nope, it would still take 6-8 hours to cook something like oxtail, you are waiting for connective tissues to break down, this takes a long period of time

slow cooking is the only way to cook some of the very tough cuts of meat, if cooked for short periods on high they are inedible, the meat needs to be coaxed gently into relaxing and becoming soft and unctuous, this is not a fast process

the oxtail is rich and soft, the cooking liqour is like a really thick rich gravy

all served on cheesey mashed spuds (had cheese needing to be used up and was low on butter)

it would still take 6-8 hours

..thus consuming ~150W for 6-8 hours.
If you cook like that on a regular basis, your electricity bill must be pretty high, so -
the point that missmouse brought up - if you're really 'on a budged' it just doesn't make sense.
That is all.

Still, thanks for sharing experiences with the slow cooking in general,
I'm not super-enthusiastic about it (talking about patience...),
but still interesting stuff; never thought about that there are dishes that can only be cooked in an apparatus like that.

roadkill banana chocolate squirrel cakes
recipe over there.

nope, it would still take 6-8 hours to cook something like oxtail, you are waiting for connective tissues to break down,

I did some in around 4 hrs on the stove top the other day, but would have been even better in a slow cooker for 8.

..thus consuming ~150W for 6-8 hours.
If you cook like that on a regular basis, your electricity bill must be pretty high

Nonsense. 150 Watts for 8 hours equates to 1.2 kiloWatt-hours (kWh or "units") . Typically we'll be paying around 15p/kWh for electricity, so that's 18p a time.

If you can afford the water, an onion and turnip from the fields and the occasional scraped-up bit of road-badger, you can afford to slow cook.

It's around 0,20 € / kWh over here, but you're right, it doesn't add up to that much.
I somehow had in mind units were more expensive tbh.

In the new year I will investigate beef consome recipes, the meat won't be floured in advance of cooking to help keep the liquor clear.

three words: gelatine freeze clarification

the oxtail is rich and soft, the cooking liqour is like a really thick rich gravy

all served on cheesey mashed spuds (had cheese needing to be used up and was low on butter)

Meat Semi.