Fix-It and Forget-It

This recipe is for everyone who wants to use a slow cooker, but doesn’t want to produce enough food for a small army. One of the reasons we love slow cookers is that we can cook up large quantities of food for our families. But what if you’re cooking for one or two, and you don’t want to eat leftovers for a week? Continue Reading...

This absolutely fabulous slow-cooked beef with juice (or au Jus, if you prefer) makes one very popular sandwich. Fix-It and Forget-It staff members were vying for the leftovers after the photos were taken. Continue Reading...

The slow cooker really comes into its own when less tender cuts of meat are involved. There’s probably a great oven method for producing melt-in-your-mouth tender brisket, but we don’t know what it is. When faced with brisket, we go for the slow cooker every time. Continue Reading...

We’re not sure what makes this beef “Hungarian.” We do know that once again the slow cooker works its magic on a less-than-tender piece of meat, turning an inexpensive cut into melt-in-your-mouth morsels. Continue Reading...

In our recent “Fall Seasonal Treats” classes at The Good Cooking Store, we featured a squash recipe as the main course. It is a delicious dish and tastes like fall.

Acorn squash is mildly flavored, so it’s great in combination with other foods. Don’t be bashful with the spices in this dish. Use them freely! This is a feast even the pickiest of eaters will enjoy. Both of our sold-out classes loved this dish.
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It has been a nutso week. I could feel it coming last weekend.

On Monday we’d be launching work on a new cookbook, including bringing in some new staff.

On Tuesday, several of us on the editorial team were driving to meet with publishing staff for the American Diabetes Association. (Watch for some great new books which we’ll collaborate on again in the future!)

Wednesday and Thursday we would have back-to-back, face-to-face meetings in our office with our key designer who lives 10 hours away.

Not much cooking time in the days ahead. But I really like to eat at home when I’ve had a pressured non-stop day.

So I started early Sunday morning, making a batch of spaghetti sauce before we headed off to church. Our older daughter was coming over at noon to watch football with Merle. (If you’re interested, more about the truce we reached on football-watching when the kids were little, at the asterisk below.*) A couple of weeks ago she told me how hungry she was for the spaghetti sauce I made when she was a little kid. Well, that’s a veiled request that’s pretty hard to resist.

I started to see a solution developing here about to how to cook this week when I would really have no time. If I made a good-sized batch of my Long-Ago Spaghetti Sauce, I’d have enough left to make a Spaghetti Pie. So I cranked up the amount of pasta I cooked for Sunday lunch to be sure I’d have enough of it for the Pie, too. I would absolutely not have time or interest in cooking as the week went along. So Sunday was the day.
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written by Tina, Assistant Manager at The Good Cooking Store

Tina bakes bread as recreation because she’s good at it and because she loves to eat it. Her cake-baking and cake-decorating hobby has turned into baking wedding cakes for her many friends that astound them and their guests. Here we get a tiny view into her early love of food. –Phyllis Pellman Good

I grew up in northwest Ohio. Many of our family vacations included a trip 5 hours north to visit my mom’s parents in Michigan. One of my fondest memories of these childhood trips was not the drive itself, although I do believe that this is where I got my love of road trips, but rather what awaited us at Grandma’s house: Hamburger Vegetable Soup.

We would walk in the door of Grandma’s house to her warm welcome. Not that she was always physically present…often we had to hunt for her out in the garden or down the road at my uncle’s farm. But the smell of warm soup on the stove always greeted us, no matter where Grandma might be.

She had a knack for making this soup, probably because she made it so many times for so many traveling children and grandchildren as a homecoming soup. Her blend of vegetables varied depending on what was in her freezer or ripe in her garden, but the staples were always the same: hamburger, carrots, celery, peas, and often potatoes. And when we tasted it, we knew we were with Grandma.
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You know that you can make an unbelievable variety of dishes in your slow cooker—from Convenient Slow Cooker Lasagna to Parmesan Garlic Quick Bread—and not just beef stew. But the right cuts of beef, cooked slowly in a slow cooker’s moist heat, are beyond-this-world delicious.

Here is a great beef recipe with some unexpected ingredients. The cola and plums add a slightly sweet taste to the beef, which, as you’ve probably guessed, comes out tender and full of rich flavor when it’s done cooking.
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This spring, Good Books, our sister company, published Fix-It and Forget-It Lightly, Revised and Updated. This new book contains information that the earlier version did not. We give the ideal slow-cooker size for each recipe, plus the Prep Time and Cooking Time for each.

We’ve added 100 new recipes, too, each with nutritional analysis, so you can better manage your efforts to eat healthfully. And there is helpful new information about how to maximize using your slow cooker.

The original Fix-It and Forget-It Lightly has sold more than 1.2 million copies, so we took care not to ruin this loved and trusted cookbook as we added some enhancements to make it more useful.

Here’s a favorite that first appeared in the original book—and is a solid part of the new Fix-It and Forget-It Revised and Updated, too!
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