Quick and Easy Vegan Slow Cooking (3 page)

W
HILE WRITING MY
first book,
Quick and Easy Vegan Bake Sale
(The Experiment, 2011), I found myself with very little time on my hands to cook dinner. However, I still wanted to put something healthy and warming on the table, meals I could feel good about serving. I developed a range of one-dish recipes that used very little by way of pots and pans (who can face all that washing up?) but still used loads of vegetables and quality vegan protein. These morphed, over time, into many of the recipes in this book.

If you don’t yet own
VBS
(as I fondly refer to it), we may need to be introduced.

Hi, I’m Carla; pleased to meet you. I’m happily married with two wonderful children, who (unfortunately) are still a lot less adventurous than I am when it comes to savory food. I’m originally from New Zealand and now reside in beautiful British Columbia, Canada. I came here after living in Queensland, Australia, and Edinburgh, Scotland. I’m also vegan. I came to veganism slowly but have been vegan for more than seven years, and I’m still going strong.

For my recipe creations I draw inspiration from my background, from food I grew up with and loved, experienced along the way, or just became interested in. I like to experiment—to put flavors together and draw from the results. My food philosophy is simple: I believe food tastes best when it’s shared—with friends and family, with laughter and love.

When I put it to my team of wonderful recipe testers (volunteers who try out the recipes and provide online feedback while the recipes are still in development to ensure they work
perfectly) that the next book was to be a slow cooker book, their responses were interesting. You see, I’d never thought too much about slow cooking, and I was surprised at how many of them had. A few people didn’t have slow cookers and weren’t interested in getting one so weren’t able to continue with testing. Others had them in the past but either gave them away through lack of use or didn’t bother replacing them when they stopped working; they were a minority. Most were excited to be able to use their slow cooker more and even recommended friends and family members as testers. I found more and more people who loved their slow cookers but hardly used them.

I guess vegans do have a bit of a love affair with their slow cookers, but it seems to be a long, slowly simmering (excuse the pun) feeling that gets forgotten every now and then. People often associate the slow cooker with slowly braised cuts of tough meat, and not many slow cooker books focus specifically on vegan (or even vegetarian) recipes. If you are an experienced vegan hoping to “up the heat” of your love affair with your slow cooker, I hope this book will help! If you’re new to veganism and afraid of losing your favorite slow-cooked meals, you too will find much to enjoy: plenty of classics and bean-packed delights, and if you want to venture into the lands of seitan, TVP, tempeh, and less common grains, I’ve got recipes for them too!

But this isn’t a book
just
about slow cooking: As I was developing these recipes, I found that I would often come home (to a house that smelled as if it were heaven!) and throw together a conventionally made side dish to go with whatever I had bubbling away. In To Serve With (
page 211
), you’ll find some of these conventionally made recipes that are either super quick and easy or items that can be made ahead and that store well. I’ve given suggestions from To Serve With for pairing with recipes in other chapters.

The focus in this book is definitely savory—main dishes, starters, and the like—seasonal, varied, and tasty. These are meals you’ll want to welcome you home, meals you’ll look forward to and plan to make again and again. You may find yourself wondering why it took so long to realize how much you really do love your slow cooker!

I haven’t given recipes using the slow cooker as a vehicle for
baking or for making breakfasts or desserts. You can do all those things (and more) in the slow cooker, but for this book, I want to feed you nutritious, tasty, savory food. In the pages that follow you’ll find easy to make, easy to cook, nourishing, and comforting dishes that are suitable for every season, every occasion, and every taste. I hope you enjoy preparing them as much as I have making them for you.

Quick and Easy Slow Cooking?

At this point you would be forgiven for scratching your head and wondering about this obvious oxymoron. How can something that cooks for six or eight hours be quick and easy? The answer is as simple as it is logical. It’s all about the preparation time and the actual active cooking time—not so much of the first, and very little of the second. Slow-cooking preparation is just quick and easy in the morning (or the evening before) instead of in the evening when you’re looking for dinner. You’re already in the kitchen for breakfast, so allow a little extra time before you rush out the door (yes, unfortunately, you may have to set the alarm 15 minutes earlier) so at the end of the day, when you have less energy and really can’t face the idea of cooking, dinner is waiting for you.

The time commitment you make in advance leads to a very quick and easy dinner when you are ready to serve. In many cases you can take the lid off the slow cooker and transfer its ingredients immediately to bowl or plate, and thence to tummy! Even when you have to perform additional steps to get the food ready for the slow cooker, there is nothing longer than 45 minutes required (and many of the longer preparation times include hands-off time). Sometimes the additional steps can be completed well in advance of starting the slow cooker, with the ingredients held in the fridge until needed. Therefore, the actual
active
cooking time, which is the cooking outside the slow cooker, is given in the preparation time noted in the recipes. Sometimes active cooking time is even divided time: you do part of the preparation early in the process and part later. Occasionally there will be a small amount of active cooking at the end of the slow cooking time
(thickening a sauce, for example), but this really is minimal, and the fact remains that dinner is ready when you want it, is very convenient, and is very “quick and easy.”

Why Use a Slow Cooker?

What benefits are there to me? What makes a slow cooker so wonderful? Here’s my list. I’m sure you’ll find your own reasons to add to this too!

CAN BE LOWER IN FAT

Case in point: I did a count of the slow-cooker recipes in this book (not including those in To Serve With and Basic Recipes) and found that out of 117 recipes there are 68 that contain no added oil—a whopping 58 percent. Of the remaining recipes, many use just a tablespoon of oil for an entire dish that serves a minimum of four (and sometimes up to eight). If there is still too much oil for your preference, adjust the amount to suit. You could sauté with less oil or with a vegetable stock when precooking your aromatics.

CAN BE HEALTHY

The recipes are not only lower in fat but also, in the main, full of fiber-containing beans, antioxidant-rich vegetables, and protein-rich soy foods.

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