I always loved cooking- I just never had the time for it. I’d look up “20 min cooking” or “30-minute dinners” online, only for me to realize that it would take 1 – 2 hours because of prep time. Prep time includes cutting up the veggies, thawing the meat, and measuring everything. Forget the last part – I’m a Filipina and we don’t measure ingredients. Everything is “tancha lang” (approximating things).
Even good ol‘ Fried Chicken takes 40 mins to do.
- 20 mins to thaw chicken
- 3 mins to create a flour mix, put it in a plastic container with cover (so that all I have to do is shake it)
- 3 – 5 mins to heat oil to the proper temperature (deep fried)
- 15 mins to fry the chicken in batches of 3 pieces.
One of the reasons why I didn’t want buy slow cookers was because I thought it was expensive, both in price and cost in electricity. That was until I realized that my rice cooker consumes more electricity than the rice cooker I bought.
Kyowa KW-2800 Slow Cooker
- 120 watts
- 1.5 Liters
Standard SRG0 Rice Cooker
- 350 watts
- 0.6 Liters
Because I wanted to buy a slow cooker, I decided to learn how to compute its cost per hour. Based on Meralco’s website, the formula for this kind of appliance is Cost per hour = Rate x (appliance wattage / 1000). That sounded easy enough to compute. (Nosebleed moment)
To get my Rate I had to go to the site and check the table. My Kwh rate is Php 11.80 (because my electric bill is more than Php 7,000 a month).
To get my Appliance Wattage, I just checked the label below the cooker. In this case it is 120 Watts [see values above] and divide it by 1,000
Filling up the values:
Cost per hour = Rate x (appliance wattage / 1000)
Cost per hour = Php 11.80 x (120 / 1000)
Cost per hour = Php 11.80 x 0.120
Cost per hour = Php 1.40
If it takes me 8 hours to cook my dinner, that would just cost me: Php 11.30 worth of electricity.
Kyowa KW-2800 Slow Cooker
- 120 watts, 1.5 Liters
- Php 1.40 cost per hour
Standard SRG Rice Cooker
- 350 watts, 0.6 Liters
- Php 4.10 cost per hour
With that in mind, plus seeing how cheap it was to purchase online, I decided to just go for it… and received it in the mail a week later.
There was some beef tenderloin sitting in my freezer that wasn’t tender at all (no matter what I did – it was gummy, chewy, rubbery – you get it).
Just to test the cooker I did the following:
Ingredients
- 1/5 kilo beef tenderloin, cut in strips
- 1 cup cream of mushroom soup. I used Knorr
- 1 onion, sliced
What I did:
- Sliced the onion.
- Dissolved the mushroom soup in a cup of water.
- Placed everything in the slow cooker and set it on automatic (4 hours high then automatically adjusts to low after).
Notes:
- I was truly surprised. I found out that if you used a cup of water or any liquid, it doesn’t evaporate or dry out no matter how long it sits there.
- The sauce became a gravy of sorts. I created mashed potatoes [failed] that ended up tasting good because of the gravy.
- It tasted better the day after when we had it with rice.
