SLOW COOKER

There are few better inventions than the slow cooker.

What a thing! While you go off and enjoy yourself (for example, at an intense band rehearsal for a carol event in Winchester, an hour's drive away) the slow cooker chugs away in your kitchen, gently warming up your chicken, ready for you to dish up hot and scoff at 10:30pm when you get back.

I have a recipe book. You should see it. It's called 200 Slow Cooker Recipes and it's like a flick-book of glossy dishes.

Exotic titles leap from the page: beer barley beef, gourmet bolognese, stuffed monkfish with coriander and chilli, spiced ginger cake and mulled cranberry jam.

Don't be fooled though. The truth is that everything that goes into the slow cooker comes out like slop.

I've used it a few times. I made lasagne first. All the ingredients went in... cheesy slop came out.

Then bolognese. All the ingredients went in... beef and tomato slop came out.

So last night I made lemon chicken. The picture in the book was a perfectly lit pile of gleaming white chicken breasts on a bed of brilliant basmati rice, glistening in a lemony sauce that made your mouth water.

Slop.

It dolloped off the ladel like wallpaper paste. For some reason (and I genuinely don't understand how) it had turned green, a colour which hardly ever adds anything to the appetising score.

However, it tasted okay. And the chicken did emerge from the gloop as I forked it out of the murky depths. It fell apart in that succulent way that tender meat often does.

I can't help feeling deceived by 200 Slow Cooker Recipes. I'd like a more realistic representation of the product of slow cooking, namely that it reduces your choices to a kind of slurpy stew, regardless of what you carefully spoon into the slow cooker.

I sipped my glass of Jamaica Fruit Punch (with a slice of left-over lemon) and sat back in my chair. If it tastes okay, that's all that really matters, I suppose.

I would like to make something that doesn't look like it got fished out of a puddle though.

Maybe I could even invent a few dishes and bind the recipes together, complete with pictures of gelatinous gloop, glimmering in the pot.

I think it'll be a while before I release a cookbook.