Smells Yummy In Here

Confession: feeding my family stresses me out. I mean, three meals a day (that's 21 meals a week!), prepared in a healthy manner, made in a way that is both appealing and frugal, and on the table by a close approximation to the generally accepted time for that particular meal: Breakfast by 8, Lunch during the Noon hour, dinner before 7...or whenever everyone's blood sugar levels dip into ogre mode.

Seriously. Who can handle that kind of pressure? It's enough to make me hyperventilate into a paper bag. Last year, Mark and I were rehashing this familiar topic. He comes home for lunch most days, and our evenings are pretty crowded, and - oh! yeah! - I homeschool our six children and teach Early Morning Seminar. So there isn't a lot of wiggle room. Anyway, we worked out a system where I would prepare lunch if he would prepare dinner, and we would just do our level best over that most-important-meal-of-the-day-breakfast-thing.

I begged him for a good crockpot-style slow cooker. A big one. Something that would hold enough to feed all of us without extra effort. Something where I could throw together a meal, put on the lid, and then walk away to stomp through my long list of responsibilities whilst the crockpot took care of itself. He ponied up, bless him. He even got me a cookbook to go with it. Success seemed imminent, even inevitable. And who doesn't love the fabulous aromas wafting through the house of a savory meal in progress? They say hunger is the best sauce, but I truly think yummy smells help a lot.

Tragically, I can't say I kept my end of the deal. It seems completely beyond me to get my act sufficiently together to prepare a meal eight hours in advance. By the time I think of it, I have only an hour and a half to go before my family morphes into crabby patties.

This is not my crockpot. I did not prepare that food. My children would run screaming from the onions.

So, meals continue to be sporadic. We try - we really do! - to have at least one sit-down-together-as-a-family meal a day; to squeeze our family of eight around our six-seater table, and have some quality time forcing our children to eat their vegetables. We have about a 70% success rate (eating together, I mean, but not with the vegetables). But that 30% gnaws at my conscience...just like that big, shiny, hardly-used crockpot in the cupboard.

Enter the uh-may-zing Brenda! She has an entire blog devoted to crockpot recipes. This could be a life-altering discovery. Definitely a menu-altering one, at any rate. I don't actually know her. I mean, we've exchanged e-mail, but she is an FOAF (friend of a friend). BUT! She is brilliant. She tests every recipe and gives them a review before she posts them (check out this recipe for crockpot french toast casserole). She even has them organized by ingredients in a sidebar on her blog. AND! (and here it the most important part for me) she has picky kids, too!

I am all ready to pull out my crockpot, clear it a permanent space on the counter, and do me some fabulously-smelling slow cooking!