Using the Crock Pot to Preserve

Sounds like a strange way to preserve food, but my crock pot is a way to easily transform excess vegetables into freezer ready meals, soups, or simple ingredients to use all winter long.

I went looking through my pictures, and some of my best preservation techniques aren’t recorded anywhere.

Like this really simple one.

Caramelized onions. Fill your crock pot halfway with sliced onion rings. Melt about half a stick of unsalted butter. Mix the butter all over the onions. Put your crock pot on low for at least 10 hours, or better than that, 12-15 hours. I then let the onions cool and put them in my largest ice cube trays. Freeze them. Pop them out and store them in the freezer in a large container. Take out one or more whenever you feel the urge to have onions, on burgers, beef, potatoes, etc. They are easily cooked in a frying pan and used for all sorts of meals.

Spiced apples are another simple recipe. Take all the apples that will fit in your crock pot. Add some cider for moisture. Some cinnamon and sugar. A little nutmeg. Slow cook for 10 hours. I cool them and put them in pint jars. To make flavored yogurt. Fill a pie crust. Make a galette. They are happily resting in my freezer waiting to be used.

Soups. Stews. Stocks. All can be easily made in a crock pot. After one meal, the rest goes into pint jars or containers in the freezer. All winter long, I can pull out chicken corn chowder, bean soups, Tuscan bean soup. Even more. Any of the soups on my compilation can be frozen to use out of season.

This soup, my Grandmother’s tomato cream soup, freezes well. Or, like in the post, can be made with frozen tomatoes and stock.

What else can be made in the crock pot? So many ways to go, with fresh or frozen ingredients.