Best gadget for cooking dinner so its prepared in advance and ready when you want it.

[ferriswheel]

My slow cooker is no good because it generally takes 6 hours to cook a meal.

Does anyone have a gadget where they can prepare the food the night before. Chuck it in that morning for the meal to be ready to serve at a specified time later on?

There's this thing on the shopping channels that you can cook loads of stuff in, in super quick time, in the microwave, locking in flavour bla bla bla.

They do demos, it does look really good, with minimal effort.

There's usually a guy cooking all these dishes, which the woman tries and goes yummy. As they do. He includes a recipe book in with the thing to give suggestions, but you can cook sweet & savoury foods in it.

You need a Thermomix. I bloody love mine, worth every cent.

That tefal thing looks amazing! I wonder if everything tastes the same though after a while?

Hire a chef?

Buy loads of ready meals and nuke them?

OK I'll be serious. Use a combination of the sc a timer and a steamer.

Use the sc to cook meat or chicken. Use the steamer plugged in to the timer for the veg, rice or pasta.

My (inexpensive) slow cooker has a high and low function. I quite often have it on before 9 or 10am, do the kids serving at 4 then DH at 6. Also has a keep warm function

I put my slow cooker on at 6am and it's ready at 6pm, I just add abit more liquid to what the recipe says and it's fine on slow, I don't understand why you can't get a timer switch on your slow cooker to come on at 11?

A telephone and a takeaway menu

Still confused as to why the slow cooker is no good? I regularly put mine on all day while I work 9-5. Most recipes that say 6 hours are generally fine done for 8-9 hours on low.

I'm also confused about the SC? But anyway. a day or so before cook bolgnaise/ casserole/ chilli/ curry/ 8 million other choices then reheat when you get in whilst cooking pasta / rice / 8 billion other choices

We have an electric oven with timer as well as a slow cooker.

The instant pot has a timer, so you can bung everything in, set the cook time, then set the timer so it will cook later.

Love my instant pot.

I love my thermomix too @AltheaorDonna

I guess the slow cooker problem is leaving food in it early on before the timer goes on. Especially in the summer.

But why would another gadget not involve leaving food in it? I don't understand what you're wanting the gadget to do that a slow cooker doesn't tbh.

How about doing lots of batch cooking, freezing it in family portions. Get dinner out of freezer in the morning to defrost, blitz in microwave when you get home. No gadget needed (beyond cooker, freezer, microwave ).

But that tefal thing mentioned earlier. Could you not freeze the raw ingredients, leave them defrosting, then bung them in for their 3 and a half minutes of cooking?

I guess im just bored of my slow cooker.

Instant pot should do most of what you need. You can put all the (e.g) risotto ingredients in, set the timer to start cooking in e.g 6 hours ready for when you need it. Risotto is delicious in my IP.

As with anything, you need to be mindful of leaving meat out at room temp for hours though. Although as the IP is a pressure cooker it does thoroughly blitz things in a way that a slow cooker doesn't.

Alternatively, you can cook from frozen in an IP so you could just grab something out the freezer and shove it in to be ready in about 20 minutes.

Instant Pot. Wouldn't be without mine.

I have a tefal cook4me that I was sent as a mumsnet product test. It is honestly the best kitchen gadget in the world. It's a pressure cooker with a whole load of functions/timers and comes with recipes pre loaded. You can connect it to a smartphone and download recipes too! I love it and use it all the time.

That is exactly what slowcookers do. I think your problem is that you are seeing 6 hours as an exact cooking time rather than a minimum cooking time. Leaving it in for another couple of hours, or even overnight, won't do any harm to most of the classic slow cooked recipes.

Slow cooker will work despite what you say or
You can heat a million things up that you've pre made in a microwave.
Make a hearty type soup you can just heat through quickly with some nice breads and cheese etc
Make a salad and leave it in the fridge! Does it need to be hot?