Crockette

Let's play dictionary:

Is a crockette

1. The WNBA team in Houston?

2. A NY-based spoof on the Rockettes?

3. A small slow cooker?

Yep, the last one. And I bought one for under $8 on clearance today.

See, we have a small dinner challenge here. Even though there are four of us, no meal really serves more than two. Which means that most of my slow cooker recipes are just way too big. Especially if it's a new food and the kids end up not wanting any. And then I won't eat the meat, which leaves Mama with 6 quarts of rejected chicken. Or, if it's beans, I have 24 cups of beans to eat.

Not good.

I'd seen listings for Beth Hensperger's Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook for Two and it dawned on me that I really should conceive of my cooking as cooking for two. I haven't bought the cookbook yet, though no doubt I will because Hensperger, author of Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook and The Bread Lover's Bread Machine Cookbook.

And so I surfed the web looking for recipes for 1.5 to 3 quart slow-cookers, learning that the Rival one is called a Crockette (my other crock pots--yep, two, 4 qt and 6 qt--are official Crock Pots; my new one is a generic Chef Mate). It seems like the same 20-odd recipes are reprinted, with a few variations and additions, everywhere: official Rival Crock-Pot site, Taste of Home community boards, and other random sites (and here). Lots of those recipes are very "fix it and forget it" with canned, condensed, cream soup and the like, not my favorite. But I think I can also halve my usual fresh and vegetarian (a la Robin Robertson) slow cooker recipes.

If it helps out with dinner, it'll be $8 well spent.