Slow Cooking in an RV

Last week on one of our shopping trips I decided to splurge and spend $19 on a slow cooker. I have one of these at home which I often use for batch cooking. My first two efforts were a British Raj Curry from a recipe by Rick Stein and a batch of Chilli con Carne from a recipe by Gordon Ramsay - I must have been having a celebrity chef day! Anyway, over a couple of days I cooked both these up and after we had taken a meal from them I bagged up the remainder in trusty zip lock bags. These store really well in the freezer as you can see in the picture below.

Staying with what I now realise is my obsession with celebrity chefs I then decided a pot roast was the way to go. In my Paprika app I stored a lot of recipes that I use before leaving home. I really like this app because you can access your recipes off line. So looking for a pot roast I remembered Jamie Oliver's Pot-roasted Pork in White Wine with Garlic, Fennel, and Rosemary. Bit disappointing not to have my own rosemary from the garden anymore but I suppose you have to make some concessions if you are going to galavant around the USA in an RV. I found all the necessary ingredients and then managed to roast potatoes and pumpkin in the RV oven - all very satisfactory. I have tried roasting veg in the convection microwave but it was nowhere near as good. I so suspect that the problem may be with me rather that the convection microwave. Results are below.

You may notice that I am photographing food on the breadboard. This is due to having inherited blue plastic plates. I have come to realise this is not the best colour for taking pictures of food. Looking at my published effort it also occurs to me that the fennel does not look anywhere near as good as it tasted.

Now for my most recent effort - no celebrity chef this time I am pleased to report. Slow Cooked Hyderabadi Chicken Biryani. I figured that biryani is very slow cooked and that someone must have tried it in a slow cooker and after a bit of searching around I found a likely looking recipe. I did not have all the ingredients so improvised a little. I liked the idea of not having to cook any vegetables separately so added pumpkin and green beans with a couple of handfuls of spinach thrown in at the end. I also decided to layer it chicken, veg, rice, chicken, veg, rice to spread the flavours through a little more. And the result? 

Well, it took a while to cook so we saw ourselves through with a glass of red and a few nibbles.

Then it was time to peek into the slow cooker and see if the experiment had worked. All was good and the result was enjoyed by Rob and I. Not so much by Simone who found the coriander seeds I had substituted for cardamom pods a little much. I must admit I think I may have been a little generous when adding them.