Crock Pot Man!

By John Addyman  |  john.addyman@yahoo.com

 

When it comes to cooking, there are three types of guys.

Those who don’t cook at all – ever.

Those who cook but want simple.

And those who treat a meal like a symphony in development with lots of players and rhythms and nuances and falderal, using ingredients most of us have never heard of.

I’m in the second category. Ever since I can remember, I’ve been simple. Ask my wife.

“He’s simple, all right,” she’ll agree. “Lord, is he simple. Want examples?”

Another time perhaps.

So, when I cook, and I like to cook, I do simple, which is why I have five crock pots of various sizes.

As I go through life, there are things that call out to me. In a grocery store, Oreo cookies and blueberry pie call my name as I cruise down the aisles. In a garage sale, it’s bread machines, records and crock pots. My wife likes to cruise the garage sale before I do so she can block my view of the crock pots and bread machines.

I came to a love of crock pots honestly. Years ago, my wife and I were both working, on slightly different schedules, and I had a chance to put a crock pot meal together before we were both out of the house.

And here’s where simple comes in. I like a crock pot meal that has very few ingredients. Very few. I don’t want to spend a lot of time sauteing or fricasseeing or braising or curing or doing whatever it is Gordon Ramsey does. I’ll cut some stuff up, sure. I’ll open some packages. I’ll brown something, but that’s it.

Here’s an example: one of my favorite recipes, and I am not making this up, is “Pepsi Pot Roast.” Prep time for this is about 90 seconds. Oil-spray the inside of your crock pot, put salt and pepper on a slice of chuck roast, spread the contents of an Onion Dip (or Onion Soup) mix all over the roast, pour the Pepsi in carefully. Throw in potatoes and carrots. Cover the crock pot, set it on low. You’re done. Go play pickleball.

Or if you’re a little on the old side, go watch people playing pickleball. Or if you’re older than me, settle in a nice chair and think about pickleball.

By the time all that pickleball is done, your spouse has come home and it’s probably time to eat.

For several years when I was working in Human Resources in corporate America, we employees would talk about diverse things, making sure to include everyone in the discussion, and make sure we heard from everyone equally because we were in excellent companies.

And when the subject got to easy meals, I had a lot to offer. So much, in fact, that I became Crock Pot Man.

Under my wife’s watchful eye, I had begun collecting crock pot recipe books. In the early days of crock pots, those recipe books were pretty thin. The first books I fell in love with were paperback that were half the size of a regular book — instead of being nine inches deep, they were four inches. I remember 5-cent comic books that size.

When someone in the office was looking for a crock pot recipe (this was long before you could do an internet search for them), I’d mention something I’d seen and bring in the book the next day.

“How about Greek chicken?” I was asked.

The next day I’d show up with two or three cookbooks, and I had an opinion on which one was simplest.

My colleagues would ask me, “Is this is a simple recipe?”

“Of course,” I would reassure. “Do I look like I’m capable of anything but simple?”

A silence would ensue. Not for long.

“Yep — you’ve got a point,” my colleague would say.

The next day, I’d ask how the meal went.

“It was good,” I’d hear. “And it was simple.”

“Like…?”

“Yeah, like you, John. Simple. You know.”

For a long time, I thought this was a good thing. But the other day I got a note from someone who read one of my columns. She wrote a very nice note and I was enjoying it very much up to when she ended it with, “And I know you’re simple.”

Wait a minute, here. I’m not THAT simple. I’ve made six-item meals in a crock pot. Not often, but I’ve done it. I’ve spent 30 minutes making a perfect roux for gumbo. I clean the fish I catch before cooking them. I put bananas on my muesli. I eat standing in the kitchen with my feet bare. I have all the records and CDs and 45s and tape cassettes in my music collection arranged alphabetically by kind of music and I can walk into the cave and step right up to where a particular record is and play it for you right then and there.

If I were that simple, my wife would have figured me out 20 minutes after we cut the cake at the wedding.

“What makes you think I didn’t?” she asks, reading over my shoulder as I write.

She pokes me in the back.

My wife is a poker. She enjoys letting me know when I’ve done something wrong or stupid by poking me. She has a very strong index finger.

The fact that my wife figured me out 56 years ago had me thinking: hasn’t it been boring knowing what I’d do and how I’d be every minute for all that time?

“Not really,” she said. “All this time I’ve been waiting for you to do something unexpected, and that keeps my interest up.”

“I guess that makes sense,” I said to her.

“Sure it does,” she said. “It’s simple.”