Slow-Cooking Convenience!

Since my husband is a minister, I often find myself needing to cook for large numbers of people. Plus, we have three children in our own family, so it has been a real source of irritation to try to use a slow-cooker for meals, because most of them are just too darn small. Either I buy three or four little round crocks, or I invest in one of those gigantic roaster ovens. Well, we're not quite to that point in our family size... so I had been searching stores for something in between.

Enter Hamilton Beach with a 6.5 quart slow cooker. It's oval-shaped, which accommodates whole chickens or large roasts very easily, plus potatoes, carrots, dumplings, or whatever else you'd like to cook along with the roast. The lid is clear plastic with a white plastic knob, so it isn't heavy and unwieldy like other slow cooker lids. This knob on top does get rather warm during use, so use a hotpad. The white crock is removable and washes up nicely. The base is attractively decorated in an "herbal" theme, with vegetables and herbs and such. The handles (which can also become warm during use, so be careful) are one of the neatest features, especially for those who are cooking for church fellowships or other get-togethers -- there are notches on the underside of the handles which perfectly accommodate a rubber band, which you can then stretch upwards and wrap around the lid knob to secure the lid while you're driving. It doesn't seal the lid, however; if you make a lot of wild turns in the minivan, it certainly can leak out. But you'd find this with any comparable product.

There are three settings: High, Low, and Keep Warm. On high, an entire chicken will cook in four hours or less. On Low, it will take six hours (eight hours for a large thick roast), but the Low setting sometimes produces even more tender results than the High. Keep Warm is handy when it's sitting in a serving line at church, but you'd better have an extension cord because its cord just isn't very long at all. It's nice if you have a lot of outlets on your kitchen countertop and don't want the messiness of too much extra cord lying around, but if you don't have an abundance of outlets, an extension cord will be necessary.

I threw out my other slow cookers after I bought this one... mainly because they were of the old variety that don't have removable crocks, and it was just way too much trouble to clean them. I may purchase a second Hamilton Beach 6.5 quart slow cooker, because it's just so incredibly handy!!