Once upon a time there was a 21 year old student called Rebecca. She loved cooking, she loved being with her friends, and she loved surprises. Then, one day, she met a slow cooker. And it was the beginning of a lifelong romance.
A few days ago my parents bought me a slow cooker to take to uni. I don't know why I'd been hesitant about using one - maybe because I kept confusing it with a pressure cooker which still frighten me a little bit. It is potentially the best investment I've ever made. I'm a big fan of anything where you just throw food into something, forget about it for a few hours and then suddenly go, "oh, there's something in there" and then are presented with a meal you've made without even realising it. Suddenly I can see myself heading out of the house for university having put, I don't know, stuff into the slow cooker, working all day, then coming home and having a meal already made. If that's not the perfect scenario then I really don't know what is.
I'm moving back to university in about a months' time, so I thought I should probably get acquainted with the slow cooker. After meeting up with someone for a very long coffee and planning session, I came home and added sausages, bacon, the remnants of some chorizo, two tins of chopped tomatoes, a tin of cannellini beans, an enormous clove of garlic, and half an onion to the slow cooker, seasoned it, gave it all a stir, then turned the heat right up, stuck the lid on and forgot about it for almost four hours until my parents came home making all the appropriate "yummy" noises as they walked through the door.
I'd consider anything that gets cooked in a slow cooker to be fast, although you could easily argue that anything that takes four hours to cook is hardly quick - but to my mind, if it's something you can get started and then leave for anything from three hours to overnight without constantly needing to poke and prod at it - it's fast food. And it really does fit in perfectly with a student lifestyle - throw the ingredients in and stick the cooker on when you leave the house to go onto campus (high if it's, say, a lecture or a seminar; low if you're going to be particularly studious and go to the library afterwards), come home and dinner's ready. I think that it really should make the list of student necessities. With hindsight, it probably would've made mine - although, my list three years ago (when did that happen??) included a corkscrew, a cafetière and a garlic press so maybe I'm not the best frame of reference for a typical student...
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