Crockpot Catastrophe!

Well, I had decided that today would be a crockpot day. I had a crockpot freezer meal (my scalloped potatoes with broccoli and ham) which was ready to go...all fully assembled and ready to dump into the crockpot before we walked out the door. I had some time before the kids descended on the kitchen to spend 10 minutes choosing what they wanted for breakfast (!) so I pulled it out and started to put it in the crockpot. And that is where the fun began.

My round crockpot will not fit my oblong frozen crockpot meal! Since I already had destroyed the plastic ziploc bag it was in, I needed to find a way to defrost the meal enough so I could break it into pieces to get it in the crockpot. (I was kicking myself because I could have placed the frozen bag into the sink with some warm water, but there was no way at this point.)

First I tried putting it into a ceramic dish and letting it sit in some warm water, but even my biggest dish didn't really fit the frozen block of potatoes, cheese, and broccoli. Then I decided that the only way it was going to get in there is if I heated the whole thing in my largest pan and busted it up as it warmed up.

So there I was, at 7:45 (kids STILL hadn't picked out their breakfast) over the stove trying to get the stupid crockpot freezer meal broken up into small enough pieces so I could get the thing into the crockpot!

Lesson learned: know the size AND shape of your crockpot so that you don't have this same situation. I turned what should have been an easy meal into the biggest hassle ever. I have a feeling that if I had one of those nicer oblong-shaped crockpots this wouldn't have been an issue. But I will have to wait for October to buy one of those. ;-)

--Katie

**update: NEVER making this one again. At least not including the broccoli in the crockpot. Unfortunately, the smell of the broccoli is making the whole dish seem completely disgusting! Also, the potatoes aren't such a lovely color because they oxidized. So after all that, this one is going down the drain. :-(