Our Favorite Slow Cooker

Practice nights used to defeat us. Two kids needing to be somewhere at five-thirty, the little ones getting hungry and loud, and nobody home with the time or the will to actually cook. We’d roll back in at seven to a dark kitchen and six hungry faces, and dinner would turn into cereal more often than Mom likes to admit.

The Crock-Pot 7-Quart Programmable is what turned those nights around. The 7-quart pot is genuinely enough to feed all eight of us — a big pot of chili or a roast with potatoes that actually fills everyone up, not just takes the edge off. Mom loads it in the morning before the chaos starts, sets the timer, and it simmers away while we’re at practice, then switches itself to warm so nothing scorches waiting for us to walk in the door.

We looked at a smaller slow cooker and one of those multi-cookers that does a dozen things. The smaller pot was an easy no — six-quart maxes out too fast for a table this size — and the do-everything multi-cooker had a learning curve none of us had the patience for on a weeknight. The Crock-Pot won on being dead simple and big enough: load it, set it, come home to dinner. At $69.99 it’s one of the cheapest things in our kitchen and quietly one of the hardest working, and it’s saved us from the cereal-for-dinner spiral more times than we can count.