Slow Cooker Potato Curry – Ad

Today, Friday 6th October, is National Potato Day and Potato.ie aka “Potatoes More Than A Bit On The Side” have asked me to come up with another potato recipe to celebrate!

Since I started working outside of the home, my love for my slow cooker has increased. It has saved my bacon so many times in the past few months. I’ve always loved having one, using one, cooking food in a slow way.

Wednesdays in particular are my downfall. I leave the house around 6.20am, and get into work about 6.50am, and work straight through until 5pm or so. These hours are my choice; I could spread them out over the week a little bit more but it allows me to spend more time at home with the kids during the week.

I’m not complaining about the hours, just trying to explain how it’s a long day and cooking is the last thing I want to do.

Those evenings we have football training as soon as I collect the kids, and it’s at this point that the temptation to look for convenience food is at its strongest.

The easier way to handle this lure is to make sure that dinner is hot and ready to serve, as soon as I walk in the door. My slow cooker is the perfect vehicle with which to do this.

If you cook meat in the slow cooker, you know that you can prepare the vegetables the night before, but must keep the meat refrigerated until the minute you turn it on. This is to prevent bacteria from forming and making you ill. I don’t have time to handle meat early in the morning. Let’s face it also it’s a bit blergh-inducing to have to handle raw meat at that hour as well.

The beauty of cooking a potato curry is that I don’t have to do any additional cooking when I get home. All that has to be done is adding the spinach. Once stirred into the curry it’s ready to serve, with oodles of protein from the chickpeas and plenty of other vegetables to boot.

If you would like to add a meat protein to this recipe, I recommend soft boiling an egg to go on top of each portion. You can have them cooked in the time it takes to stir in the spinach and dish up the rest of the dinner.

[recipe][recipe title=”Slow Cooker Potato Curry” servings=”6″ time=”5 hours” difficulty=”easy”]

Ingredients

• 10 peeled medium white potatoes, chopped into bitesize chunks (here’s what I did with the peels)
• 1 tin of tomatoes, 454g
• 1 jar of chickpeas, 454g (liquid included, don’t drain)
• 1 large white onion, sliced
• 4 large carrots, peeled and sliced
• 2 yellow peppers, sliced
• 250ml water
• 2 teaspoons garam masala
• 2 teaspoons mild curry powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon ground coriander seed
• 4 large handfuls of fresh spinach leaves

Method

Take all the ingredients, excluding the spinach, and put into a slow cooker. These ingredients will fill a 3.5L slow cooker so be warned it might get a bit messy on the next step!

Stir well so that the spices are combined with all the other ingredients.

Cook on high for 4 hours, or until the potatoes are cooked through. If after 4 hours the potatoes aren’t cooked through, it’s likely you cut them too big!

After 4 hours, turn off the heat, stir in the spinach leaves. Once the leaves begin to wilt a little bit, serve immediately.

[/recipe]

You’re probably wondering at this stage how I manage to have my dinner piping hot and ready when I leave the house at such an early hour. The secret is a timer plug. I set my timer plug to come on 4 hours before I’m due home. So I turn on the plug and the cooker when I leave but the cooker doesn’t actually kick on until later in the day.

Disclosure: This blogpost was sponsored by Potato.ie – Potatoes More Than A Bit On The Side. If you want to learn more about my policies around disclosure and sponsorship, please click this link.