Fix-It and Forget-It Holiday Favorites

March 19, 2018
Comerford (A Busy Mom’s Slow Cooker Adventures blogger) gives the slow cooker another workout with 150 summertime recipes for entertaining. Selections include meatballs (sweet and sour, honey, and chipotle orange), as well as creamy artichoke or cheesy Mexican–flavored dips. Barbecue flavor dominates in pulled chicken and pulled pork sandwiches, multiple brisket dishes, and in the six preparations for ribs included. Comerford covers the standbys: mac and cheese, sloppy Joes, and tacos (including a lentil variation). Simple crowd-pleasing vegetable sides include corn on the cob bathed in chili lime butter, or yogurt and cheese twice-baked potatoes; desserts are fruit-based cobblers, puddings, or dump cakes. Comerford provides serving suggestions along with excellent tips on how to determine cooking times and adjust cooking (“If you’d like your dish to thicken a bit, take the lid off during the last half hour to hour of cooking time”). With the slow cooker as the workhorse and Comerford’s helpful guide, home cooks can count on stress-free summertime entertaining.

February 17, 2020
Home cooks on the road with limited storage and prep space are the intended audience for food blogger Comerford’s (Fix-It and Forget-It Holiday Favorites) collection of 150 simple recipes for the slow cooker solicited from fans. The slow cooker’s ease of use—the very definition of “fix-it and forget-it”—makes it a terrific choice for preparing dishes while traveling, as Comerford’s followers show time and again with dishes that often call for fewer than five ingredients, among them honey chicken thighs, chili-lime corn on the cob, sloppy joes, pulled pork, and a chocolate peanut butter swirl dump cake. This simplicity occasionally borders on the ludicrous, with “recipes” for Sweet N Sour Meatballs, consisting of frozen meatballs, grape jelly, and chili sauce; barbecued cocktail sausages (four packages of cocktail sausages and a bottle of barbecue sauce); chili-cheese taco dip (a pound of Velveeta, browned beef, and a can of chili); and hot dogs, in which readers are instructed to fill their slow cooker with as many hot dogs as they’d like and cook, then “serve in hot dog buns with your favorite toppings.” While the recipes themselves are thin, this volume just might be the answer to those traveling on a tight budget.