So now I’ve got a slow cooker with a timer, I can try that whole “throw something in the cooker before work, come home to dinner already cooked” nirvana the slow cooking evangelists talk about.

I thought I’d start easy with basically a veg stew, spiced up Morroccan style. I’m working from this BBC Good Food recipe, which apparently covers your entire 5–day-veg quotient in one go!

The only  changes I made were to use only 2 onions (as that felt like enough) plus I added a second can of tomatoes and extra honey as I was worried about a lack of liquid after the mincemeat burning… Oh plus I added a bunch of garlic (who leaves out garlic!?).

So that gave me:

• 4 carrots
• 4 parsnips
• 2 red onions
• 2 red peppers
• 2 cans chopped tomatoes
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 4 cloves of garlic
• 2 handfuls of soft dried apricots, halved
• 2 tbsp honey
• 1 tsp each of
  • cumin
  • paprika
  • chili
  • cinnamon

I was quite proud of myself not anally measuring everything out as if I were baking. So there were some heaped teaspoons of spices, and I genuinely grabbed a couple of handfuls of the dried apricots!

So that all goes in the cooker, gets a good mix, and goes on low for 6 hours, then the time will switch it to warm until we get home and eat (so it’ll probably spend another 6 hours on warm — we’ll see how that goes!).

To be honest this took longer to prep than I expected. After all the peeling and chopping an measuring, it probably took half an hour.

However I did forget I was going to add chickpeas… so the plan is to add those as soon as I get home.

Woohoo! I was glad to get home and find that not only had the house not burned down, nor had the tagine burned or stuck :) So I added the chickpeas and it got another hour on warm before we ate.

I served it with the chickpea flatbread I made yesterday (which I warmed in the oven) and some couscous.

And it was pretty damned tasty! Plus given the stew and couscous had so few calories, the bread won’t have hurt the waistline too much :)

I’d certainly do it again as a weeknight dinner, I’d just have to keep in mind that it takes half an hour to prep. I’ll have to look out for dinners that marinade overnight and require less chopping and peeling in the morning!