The Best Thing I Bought in 2016: My Crockpot

I have never been more pleased with a piece of kitchen equipment.

Sometime last winter, when it was very cold and I was hungry, I decided that I would buy a crockpot. Most likely inspired by a listicle somewhere in the home cooking internet featuring 898 crockpot meals you can make in a day, I ordered one for pickup at Bed Bath and Beyond and marched myself there one day after work.

The one I selected wasn’t huge, but it wasn’t small either — maybe 4.5 quarts. The internet told me that it was perfect for a family of four. It cost me about $30 and was extremely unwieldy to take home on the train. But once it was out of the box and ready to go, I realized that I had been really missing out.

I’ve never wanted to own a crockpot because I’m somehow traumatized by the notion of them from childhood. Nothing bad ever happened with ours; the food went in, the machine turned on and when my sister and I got home from school, dinner would be ready. As an anxious child with a tendency to assume the worst and perhaps scarred from a hazy memory that involves a toaster oven catching on fire, I assumed that plugging in a large appliance and leaving it on for the rest of the day while you physically left your house meant that you would come home to a three alarm blaze.

This never happened. The crockpots of my youth remained intact and my house never went up in flames. My current crockpot has never exploded. It does exactly what I want it to do, which is make me dinner so I can do other things.

“It turns itself off after it’s done,” my father told me when I expressed this fear. “Why would it just stay on? That makes no sense.”

A crockpot has always seemed like a lazy indulgence, a strange sort of suburban housewife thing that I wouldn’t need. I’m not cooking for a family of five boys who want chili after hockey practice, so why would I need a slow cooker that could make that volume of food? Cooking for one is an art that I’ve yet to learn; every meal I make could reasonably feed my fictional family of ruddy-cheeked men because that’s how I like it. I do love to cook, but honestly, it is effort. If I can throw a bunch of crap in a thing, plug that thing in and then have a meal that lasts me for five days, why wouldn’t I do it? There is no reason to deny myself the indulgence.

I know you can make a cake in a crockpot and while that seems intriguing, I’d really rather not. Usually I make a nice curry or something Rachael Ray would call a “stoup.” Out of all the things I’ve purchased over the year — many lip balms; books I haven’t read; presents for my cat — the crockpot has truly brought me joy. It’s truly worth the money. Bury me with my crockpot. I’ll take it to the grave.

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