Bring Your Slow-Cooker to Work Day

It’s eerie how my 1500-miles-away sister and I are on the same spooky mental wavelength sometimes. It happened again this week.

I’ve been on a hot slow-cooker streak recently, and as you all know I’ve blogged about that a bit. Then my sister (who doesn’t read my blog much, because she has better things to do than goof off on the Internet all day) sends me an e-mail. And it’s all about a great way to use your slow-cooker.

Take it to work! Yes, work! And set it cooking in the morning for a delicious, nutritious lunch. She and her buddy Juliette came up with this idea. I’ve never heard of this before. It’s brilliant, and receives the Ideas For Frugal Living seal of approval.

Their inaugural slow-cooker lunch was Lentil stew. Oh, lordy. Yummy, yummy, yummy. I know for a fact it’s yummy, because this is Juliette’s recipe, and I was lucky enough to have some when I was last in California. (BTW, she is the BEST cook. Vegetarian, too. Her tofu mac ‘n’ cheese is to DIE for). This is the best lentil stew I have ever had in my life. My sister is so lucky.

Sometimes the lunches we bring to work aren’t very appealing when it actually comes time to eat them. So what do we do then? We go out and buy something. But a slow-cooked, yummy, warm, home (work?)-made lunch? Wow! If I knew that was waiting for me in the breakroom, I’d never want to go out and buy anything again. I probably wouldn’t be able to keep my mind on my work, though.

You know something, you could probably use this idea to cook your dinner, too! Get to work a little early, toss everything in, let ‘er rip, than cart the whole thing home when it’s time to leave for the day.

Spend some time on the weekend doing the prep-work, and/or freezing containers of ready-to-be-slow-cooked meals. Imagine if you had a week’s worth of dinners ready to go, right out of your fridge and freezer? That would make it much easier to resist expensive eating-out temptation just when you are at your weakest point, tired and hungry from working all day. Just pour everything into the slow-cooker when you get to work. It would be easy to bribe your supervisors and co-workers into compliance with your dastardly deed (i.e, using company electricity to cook your lunches and dinners). Just feed them, too, once in a while.

Doing it this way means you don’t have to worry that you cooked things too long, and also you can keep an eye on it if you’re afraid of your slow-cooker shorting out and burning down your house. I didn’t use my slow-cooker as much as I should have during my working days because I always worried about that. And I also worried about the doings of my rascally pooches when I was gone all day. Because there’s precedent. Oh, wait a minute - let’s not forget you would be using someone else’s electricity. Yipeee!

I’m pretty sure I could have gotten away with this during my working years. Library-folk are a little on the kooky side, and most are pretty cheap, too, so they would no doubt have appreciated my initiative. Oh, except for that stuffed-shirt butt-kisser who snitched on me for raising homeless puppies in a cardboard box under my desk. But what could I do? They needed to be bottle-fed every hour! Geesh. (But I think it worked out for her. Last I heard, she’s quickly moved up the ranks and holds a very prominent position in the library Gestapo). But come to think of it, I could have been really sneaky and put the slow-cooker under my desk if I needed too. Slow-cookers aren’t as noisy as homeless puppies. See - it’s doable, no matter the Gestapo situation at your work.

Uh-oh. Here it comes. A Frugal grand-slam: if you have more than one slow-cooker, leave the extra one at work permanently and set it cooking when you leave work in the evening with delicious overnight oatmeal, for breakfast at work in the morning. Bam!