Nice and slow

I don't own a crockpot. I have never owned a crockpot. My mother did not own a crockpot nor did my grandmother. I have never in my life cooked in a crockpot. Most likely I never will.

Now this is not really some personal aversion to the device. I know lots of people who swear by crockpots and get a lot of good use out of them. I know people that would prefer to cook in their crockpots to cooking a regular meal any day of the week. I have heard all of the things about how easy and convenient they are. 

It is just that they were never part of my life. Just like I had no idea what that blue box from Kraft was all about until I was in high school, we didn't do meals like that when I was growing up. There were  not a lot of short cuts or easy solution meals going on. Instant foods were not a big staple around the house as a kid. I suppose that is a biproduct of living with my grandmother.

Of course now I am more than willing to cook a box of instant potatoes. I have also been known to make instant mac and cheese, though that was mostly in college. I will take short cuts to my meals and take the easy road when necessary. There just isn't going to be a crockpot involved.

First off I have no idea how to use one. I know they are pretty foolproof, but in my world words like foolproof are just an invitation for disaster. With my luck I would destroy the damn thing or get  nothing but inedible meals out of it.

More importantly though the husbeast would not eat anything that came out of it. He flat out refuses. If we go to someones house for dinner and they let him know dinner was made in a crockpot, he is hard pressed to choke down dinner, even if it is really amazingly good.

According to him, when he was growing up his step father had no teeth. As many can imagine this would make eating difficult. The solution was apparently to cook every meal in a crockpot until it was super soft and easily gummed. As a result the majority of the husbeasts meals as an adolescent were soupy mushy concoctions ladled out of a crock pot.

He tells me that the final straw was when his step father cooked steak to the point that it was so soft that they couldn't use forks to eat it. He swore after that he would never eat anything that was cooked from a crockpot again. He is nothing if not stubborn.

Now I understand that this is not the common use for a crockpot. I understand that it is normally not the case at all. I know that you can make tasty food in these contraptions, and I think he understand that too. It is just a lot of psychological damage that isn't about to be undone by one nice pot roast.

I have come to accept this and am mostly ok with it. I don't have any desire to own or use a crock pot, and he has no desire to eat anything from one. There are days though that I think that it would be so very nice to dump everything in a pot in the morning and have dinner ready when I get home. Also there are a million great looking recipes out there for a slow cooker which I will never get to use and that is a little frustrating.