Healthy Living

How the Crock Pot Caveman learned an economical lesson on maintaining a trusty home kitchen appliance with the timely acquisition of some Rival crock pot parts…

The first few posts on here were obviously my accounts of learning some of the easier or more basic beginner crock pot recipes out there. Recently, however, my Wife made me aware of something that I had never really dwelt on before: the idea of the value and importance of crock pot maintenance, and knowing when to shop for the right Rival crock pot replacement parts instead of a whole new crock pot.

Recently, our trusty old Rival crock pot was starting to show its age – the knobby handle thing on the top of the crock pot lid had started to become very loose and was clearly about to brake right off. Of course I was under the impression that this was a sign that it was time to go out and start shopping around for a new slow cooker. My wife, however, had different ideas about what needed to be done. For her, the obvious course of action was to start scouting around for a replacement knob for our crock pot lid, and if that ultimately proved to be fruitless, then to hunt around for a replacement crock pot lid. Either way, she figures, the cost of maintenance should be maybe one quarter or one third the cost of going and replacing the crock pot with an entirely new one.

Save money with replacement parts for your crock pot

So, just what is the Rival Crock Pot Dream Kitchen and why am I sharing it with you here?  The “Dream Kitchen” is a collection of some of the fancier Rival Crock Pots that I have seen out in the marketplace and which I think it would be really neat to own – kind of like how we all used to browse through those Christmas toy catalogs when we were kids and think about all of the neat toys we wanted from them.  The reason I am sharing this list here is because I only recently became aware of some of these different crock pot slow cooker models myself and I am guessing that maybe, just maybe, there are a few of you out there who are also mostly unaware of some of these more uncommon Rival slow cookers.

You know, this is a post that has been a while in the making. It’s not that there was really any research or product testing to do,(lol) or lots and lots of writing to do. Nope, the reason I kept delaying and putting off posting this list is because everytime I thought I was ready to share it, I would become aware of yet another distinctly different and interesting crock pot that is out there.

Okay, now without any further ado I present to you my own personal Rival Crock Pot Dream Kitchen!

The rival crock pot dream kitchen!

After walking me through a number of easy crock pot recipes, my wife decided that it was time for me to experience a slow cooker recipe with a few more variables involved.

Oh boy.

She informed me that this time around we were going to try out an easy (enough) crock pot fish recipe. Well, it turns out that this recipe required a few more ingredients and a little more effort but in the end it was well worth it.  You will notice when you look over the ingredients list that there are a number of things to add but despite that you will see that it is not really too much trouble.  So let’s take a gander at what we used with this crock pot fish recipe:

“The Ingredients”:

• * Two cans of shrimp (about 5 ounces each drained)
• *Two cans of tuna (about 7 ounces each – flaked)
• *Two cans of crab meat (about 7 ounces each) – pick over the contents of the cans to remove any remaining cartilage
• *One can of chopped pimientos (4 ounces drained)
• *1/3 cup of minced fresh parsley
• *Three cups of instant rice, uncooked
• *Two cans of condensed cream of mushroom soup
• *Three cups of water
• *One-half cup of dry white wine
• *One-quarter cup of onion (chopped)
• *Two teaspoons of dill weed
• *One-half a teaspoon of paprika
• *One-half a teaspoon of Tabasco sauce

My Wife was not kidding when she told me that this crock pot fish recipe is not too difficult to prepare despite the longer list of ingredients included.  First off, you need to place the first six of the listed ingredients in to your Crock Pot slow cooker.  Second, you need to combine the cream of mushroom soup with the water, wine, onion, dill weed, paprika and the Tabasco sauce. Now you have to pour that mixture over the rice and seafood mixture in your Crock Pot.  Stir all of these combined ingredients gently to make sure that they are all well-blended together. Now you need to cover and cook your combined ingredients on the low setting for between 3 to 4 hours. After that you are all done and will be free to enjoy your newly prepared – and easy Crock Pot fish recipe.  I hope that you are able to enjoy this recipe as much as this caveman did!

Challenging the caveman with a crock pot fish recipe

After learning how to easily prepare some simple Crock Pot slow cooker recipes with some other cuts of meat, I realized that I had left pork off the table, so to speak, and thought it was maybe time to have my turn at preparing a meal involving pork and my Crock Pot.  To keep things as easy as possible, my Wife decided that we should go with an easy Crock Pot pork roast recipe.  Sounds good to me!  So lets take a look at how we did it and at what results we got.

This ended up being a veerrry easy to follow recipe (the kind I like) for a tasty slow cooked pork roast.  My wife made it clear to me at the outset that the most important thing for this recipe, is that you make sure that the cut of pork that you choose to go with is a good fit for your Crock Pot; it doesn’t really matter so much what cut or joint of pork you choose to go with – shoulder or leg are both good examples – more that your piece of meat is a comfortable fit in the slow cooker.

With the above caveat in mind, lets take a look at the ingredients we went with for this recipe:

A caveman friendly crock pot pork roast recipe

I was recently shown how to prepare a very simple crock pot beef stew recipe that requires only a few ingredients for a very delicious tasting beef stew.

This is a really easy recipe with just a few ingredients for a really delicious tasting beef stew.  Before I get too far into discussing how I actually went about preparing the stew, I should give you a run down of the ingredients needed for it.  Here you go:

Ingredients:

• four medium sized red potatoes
• one to one-half  lbs. of beef stewing meat
• one-third of a cup of flour
• salt and pepper to individual taste
• one 14 oz. can of diced tomatoes undrained
• two cups of water
• three cups in total of frozen stir-fry bell peppers and onions

So, what do you do with all of this?

Well, first, you need to go and scrub the potatoes and then after that go and cut each one of them into quarters.  After doing this you need to go and place all of the cut up potatoes along the bottom of your Crock Pot.  Next, you need to go and mix the flour, salt and pepper together and then toss it with the beef cubes and make sure that the beef cubes are well coated.  Now you can go and add the coated cubes to your CrockPot.  The next thing you should do is add the undrained tomatoes and the water and stir them into the crock-pot.  Once this is all done, you can cover the crock pot and get it cooking.

Okay, now that we have our crock pot fully loaded with the necessary ingredients we can start cooking it; you should set it to cook on your crock pot’s low setting and let it cook away for about seven or eight hours, until the meat and potatoes are at the desired tenderness.  At this point you need to go and add the stir fry veggies to the crock pot and put the cover back on and let it all cook for another thirty to forty minutes (still on the low setting) until the vegetables are nice and tender.  When it is all said and done you should find yourself with a nice tasty slow cooked beef stew that will be enough to give you about four to six servings at your table.

See – I said that this was going to be an easy crock pot beef stew recipe, right? All nice and painless, and leaving you with a tasty meal in the end.

A tasty crock pot caveman beef stew recipe