Paired with some crusty bread and a simple salad, mussels make a lovely light meal. But getting them perfectly cooked can be tricky, with most stovetop recipes inevitably turning out some overcooked and some undercooked mussels. We made cooking mussels absolutely foolproof by using our multicooker, which evenly surrounded the mussels with steam and resulted in a pot full of tender, plump mussels every time. On the pressure setting, we needed to cook the mussels for just 1 minute; on the slow cook setting (which heats up much faster than a traditional slow cooker) the mussels were cooked perfectly within half an hour. To infuse the mussels with lots of flavor, we sautéed garlic, thyme, and red pepper flakes in butter, and used wine as the cooking liquid. We finished the mussels with a sprinkle of fresh parsley. You can substitute 3 pounds of littleneck clams for the mussels; increase the pressure cooking time to 2 minutes. Discard any raw mussels with an unpleasant odor or with a cracked or broken shell or a shell that won’t close. Serve with crusty bread.
Use the powerfully spicy Korean chile paste, gochujang, to flavor tender beef brisket, along with the gochugaru chile flakes for added heat, sesame oil, garlic, and lots of fresh ginger. If you can’t find gochujang, Sriracha makes a good though slightly less spicy substitute.
For flavorful ribs from the slow cooker, we cut the St. Louis-style ribs in half crosswise, coated each half liberally in a spice rub (a mix of paprika, brown sugar, salt, pepper, onion powder, and granulated garlic), arranged them on end (exposed rib side down) around the rim of the cooking insert, and let them slowly cook until tender. To get that signature shiny, sticky finish, we made an easy barbecue sauce that we brushed onto to the ribs before broiling them.
For many of us, rice pudding evokes comfort as well as indulgence. This version is creamy and nostalgic and takes very little work.
This dish simply speaks to us—a recipe that uses traditional Korean flavors but with a preparation that is wholly American.
Creamy and mild, this simple curried soup is full of tender fall vegetables and the warming flavors of ginger and garlic.
This is a classic dump-and-cook crock pot recipe.
This new-age take on an old-world dessert is completely my fault. I made it up, tested it to the nth degree and stand behind its unashamed sweet and savory idiosyncrasies. It is constructed like a traditional sticky toffee steamed pudding, with salty olives and candied clementine taking the candied dates' role, honey and rosemary stepping in for the toffee sauce, and silken chestnut flour playing the supporting starchy role typically taken by a wheat flour-based pudding mixture. The totality is earthy and cosmopolitan. It is a riff on a sweet and savory cornmeal pudding I developed for Cooking Slow.
Okay, here we go. Either we have you hooked at "Ultimate Cheater Pulled Pork" or this book is headed straight for the library's used book sale. We know that. You know that. So, let's drop the chitchat and make some cheater barbecue.
Fish is easily overcooked, which makes it a strong candidate for slow cooking and an easy night's work for the cook--unless of course you complicate matters by throwing something tricky into the mix. I love a culinary dare. Rich fish like salmon and mackerel are delicious served with beans, but the two cook at such different rates, they typically can't be cooked together. By using red lentils, which are the softest of dried beans, and a forgiving fatty fish, like farm-raised salmon, I found I could trim the difference to about 10 minutes. A brief simmering of the lentils on their own does it; then the salmon is added and everything slow-bakes together in a low oven.