Slow cooker for vegetarian/vegan food? Pointless or worth it?

[Bathrum]

Hi all

I bought a slow cooker yesterday (in Lidl - bargain ) as I've heard lots of good things about them and how they make life easier.

My DP thinks we should take it back because:

1. it's better for meat dishes (we're veggie/vegan);
2. we can achieve the same outcome (i.e. being able to leave food to cook slowly for a few hours) by just leaving a pot on the hob on very low heat - his point being the slow cooker is essentially an electric heat sauce with a lidded pot, which sounds like a fair point;
3. it's going to be hard to store, which will be annoying, especially if we don't use it much because of points 1 and 2...

I'm a fan of 'one pot' style cooking generally - eg chilis, curries, dhals etc so is this going to make a difference to me? In my mind, I like the idea of shoving everything in, turning the thing on and coming back to yummy supper but if it's not like that in practice (i.e. you have to fry everything off first or something) then I suspect he might be right and it'll be more hassle than it's worth.

What do people think? Is he right?

I'm not veggie, but I live in a country where jarred sauces (eg for pasta, curry etc) aren't really a thing - you can buy a jar of imported dolmio if you're happy to spend a fiver, more like a tenner for a Palak curry sauce.

Vegetables here, however, are insanely cheap & good quality. So my main use of the SC is for big batches of sauces to cook with later. You can also obviously avoid adding sugar, salt & anything else you'd rather not eat too much of.

So now I batch cook whatever is ripe & needs using every weekend, then stick blend it. The freezer is permanently full of delicious home made sauces & soups - I tailor use of herbs & spices to whatever I'm using up.

Well worth it for that alone, although it's also brilliant for cooking cheap cuts of meat.

Thanks everyone. Well, I'm keeping it... I'm going to give it a go. One thing I noticed is that lots of the recipes don't require oil/fat, which is obv different to hob cooking (and good for the 5:2 thing I'm doing, as it means I can be more accurate with calories), so that's an added bonus.

I'm going to try a lentil dhal in it tomorrow - this is one of our regular dishes so it'll be a good test to see if it is as nice as the normal ones we make.

Thanks for all of your advice - I really appreciate it.