Mable Hoffman's Crockery Cookery

Nourishing, mostly gourmet slow-cooker recipes and a few new tricks for your crock pot. You never knew your crock pot could be so handy! "Everybody" knows that slow cookers are good for pot roasts and chili con carne. But did you know that your slow cooker could produce chocolate cake, chicken and dumplings, and rice pudding? I didn't, either. The wonder of it is, your crock pot can make all these wonderful dishes and many more with less prep time and inconvenience than the traditional versions in most cases. Mable Hoffman's Crockery Cookery is just what I needed to dust off my slow cooker and get started with the rest of my life.Regarded by many as The Standard for crock pot cooking, this revised and updated recipe book has all of the basic favorites and quite a few more sophisticated dishes. To date I have only tried 13 in all, a mere fraction; and a few standouts like Flank Steak in Mushroom Wine Sauce and the Nostalgic Chicken and Herbed Dumplings, have made this purchase totally worthwhile. I would have stopped at entrees, but no - there are also some great soups, vegetable side dishes, party appetizers and desserts. Yes, you can bake cakes and breads in crock pots that have at least 4 and ½ quarts capacity, but be warned that they do come out on the soft side, without that top crust. I found the banana bread pleasant enough, however.The real surprise for me was in how perfectly suited my crock pot was for steamed pudding recipes. Bread pudding is a natural here. But get ready for a heavenly Grandma's Rice Pudding - light, fluffy, just the right amount of sweetness and no more. The best I have ever tasted, bar none.I should hasten to add that Mable Hoffman puts an emphasis on preparing recipes from fresh, wholesome ingredients, and very few of them involve opening cans. You will end up with nutritious, lower-than-average-salt dishes that will take a little more prep time than frozen dinners, but greet you with a delightful aroma when you walk in after a hard day's work. Most of the recipes are even thrifty when compared to a fast food diet. I don't remember how I ever managed to cook for my family 6 days a week before I discovered this cookbook!My only complaint is that I have used mine so much in the last 4 months that a few pages escaped from the softcover binding. No problem: I am getting my copy spiral bound at a local copy center. I intend to keep this one around for many years to come.-Andrea, aka Merribelle

I live in Minnesota where the winters are long and cold, so I have a crockpot with soup going all winter. I don't know if this cookbook that I sent to my brother in Florida had all the sames recipes as my Revised and updated edition that I've had for years, but I hope so, as the soup recipes are really good Just ask my husband. Barb from Eden Prairie, Mn

Used recipes out of this book years ago and lost the book with a couple of moves

Some of these recipes are fantastic, like the Sauerbraten. I had a very old copy of this book which literally fell apart. I had to replace it just for this recipe. However, I love making soup, and I've yet to have a failure, until I tried the Tavern Soup. Maybe it was the cheese I used, but I was expecting something very different from what came out of the pot. So overall, very good, but caution for some of the recipes

I got this based on recs at another site. honestly, I was underimpressed when I read the recipes. I've been using a crockpot for several years and consider myself a relatively good cook without using recipes much...the recipes to me appeared to be very similar to what I already throw together. but...the minor changes have helped me to make the most delicious food...in fact, yesterday I made the brisket with picante sauce (I really didn't want to make it but had already purchased the ingredients) oh my gosh, it was delicious. I would highly recommend this everyone - even get it for people as a wedding gift. I am so glad I gave this a chance...

I really liked this book and have had it in my kitchen for decades. When my 1975 Bantam edition got dog-eared and started losing its binding from a lot of use, I decided to buy an new copy. When the book arrived I was a bit underwhelmed. The recipes I normally use are still there, and 77 new recipes have been added. However the layout and formatting were changed and are no longer practical. Page numbers are the thinnest of fonts and hard to read. The former bold capitalized serif font used for the recipe titles has been replaced by an 'artsy' sans-serif, almost cursive, large but extremely thin font which takes up 2-1/2 times the vertical space. Each page often used to hold two recipes and less often just one; no recipe continued to a second page. In both books the ingredient list font is bold and the recipe text is the same font, but not bold. However, in the later book that font seem lighter. The table of contents in the new edition is tiny and seems crammed in, though five of the next six pages are blank; the sixth contains "About the Author".

I have a thousand cookbooks, but show me a HP press cookbook and I've got to have it. If they were the only ones I had, I would have all I ever needed to cook anything I or anyone else would want in the best, most flavorful way it could be cooked. These are wonderfully illustrated with the best written directions available. If you enjoy cooking, don't pass these up.

I like the smaller paperback book formzt as it is easier to store yet contains the recipies I rely on.