Book Review: 2 Qt Mini Crock Pot Cookbook Easy Meals for Beginners 2025

Title: 2 Qt Mini Crock Pot Cookbook Easy Meals for Beginners 2025 

Author Olivia Graham

Date: 2025

Quote: "Cover and cook on low for 6-8 hours or high for 3-4 hours in the 2-quart crockpot."

Here are recipes in their simplest form, no preambles, just good clear instructions, designed to allow people whose only cooking tool is a Crock-Pot (or similar slow cooker) to prepare almost everything in the Crock-Pot. Some recipes presuppose a stove or microwave in the vicinity. Most don't. And there are recipes for eggs, French toast, every kind of meat and vegetable dish, several side dishes and desserts. If you are a student living in a chilly little apartment and need just a little extra heat while you're at work or school, this is the cookbook for you.

This author has published a lot of recipe collections in a short time, and it shows. Most of the recipes are basically solid. They direct readers to cook meat long enough to kill the pathogens and heat food at temperatures at which it's likely to cook without scorching and so on. They combine foods many people like. So, even if they don't turn out exactly as advertised, or aren't your very favorite thing, they'll still be food. You can't go too far wrong. 

That said, once again, these cookbooks have not been carefully re-tested and edited as Graham's general ideas are adapted to each new technique. That general tendency pervades the whole collection and is especially obvious in this book, where each recipe is prevented for use with either the 2-quart or the 0.65-quart slow cooker. Proportions of ingredients are worked out mathematically and can add up to a lot of spices in some dishes. Some ethnic dishes are traditionally made with large amounts of spices, apparently chosen for their antibiotic value more than for taste, but generally the pinch of spices in a combination that works for a small dish will satisfy many people if you use it in a large dish. Or, when reading recipes that call for a full teaspoon of one spice and a tablespoon of another spice, a prudent approach is to mix the whole quarter-cup or half-cup full, store it in a small jar, and sprinkle the mixture into food you actually plan to eat. Taste as you go--you can always add more. Spices can be pricey for the kind of cook looking for a large collection of easy recipes to use with a Crock-Pot.

Photos are often clearly not taken of the recipe as it's given in this book. Sliced zucchini is shown where the recipe calls for diced zucchini. Pineapple slices appear on the sides of the pineapple upside-down cake, which can be achieved in a Crock-Pot, but the recipe says nothing about how they got there and merely advises the beginner to lay the slices on the bottom of the pot as if baking the upside-down cake in a standard cake pan. 

However, as Graham observed in a different e-book reviewed here last week, cooking should be fun. You can usually omit the cheese. You can reduce, substitute, or omit spices. Can you substitute nondairy milk (actually some recipes recommend nondairy milks), gluten-free flour, vegetarian meat analogs...? You can try. Sometimes the results of tweaking recipes will be...innovative. Cakes and breads may come out like puddings; sauces may set up like doughs. They will be safe to eat, anyway, and may supply funny stories you might even sell to a magazine some day.

(A tip for those who want to substitute vegetarian meat analogs. There's a vegetarian analog for almost every kind of meat, but most of them have to be cooked differently from meat. Typically the soy-and-wheat-based kind will either become rubbery or dissolve if cooked long enough to tenderize beef or kill the worms in pork. Typically you stew the slow-cooking vegetables by themselves, then add the vegetarian meat analog during the last half-hour or quarter-hour of cooking time.)