Slow cooker tapioca pudding

I wanted to make some tapioca pudding.  However, as the minute tapioca at Kroger was selling for an exorbitant price, I decided to get a bag of tapioca pearls for $0.99 at the Chinese grocery store.  I found a good recipe and went to work.

My notes:

• This really could not have been easier: mix ingredients; turn on slow cooker.  Not too difficult.  It didn't even require soaking the tapioca pearls beforehand.
• A few of the reviewers at AllRecipes mentioned that the eggs were more for texture rather than taste.  I'd probably only use one egg next time instead of two.
• The recipe didn't call for vanilla but I threw some in.  It probably ended up being somewhere between 1 1/2 and 2 teaspoons since I just used whatever we had left in the bottle.
• Our slow cooker doesn't have a "medium" setting; it has "high", "low", "simmer", and "warm".  So I set it for 1.5 hours on high, then turned it to low for about 15 minutes, after which I thought that was too much heat and set it to simmer for the last hour of cooking.  This seemed far under the time that recipe said the pudding would take, but it seemed to be nicely thickened at this point, and based on evidence it didn't seem to be getting any thicker with the longer cooking.  Rather than risk it burning, I just turned off the heat.
• If anything, I'd reduce the sugar a bit, maybe to half cup; 2/3 cup seems a bit excessive.
• I used nonstick spray on the liner of the slow cooker.  I don't know if this helped, but I certainly didn't want to find out how fun cleanup would be without it.

Definitely a recipe I'd try again.

Delicious!

Slow cooker Cuban braised beef and peppers

Real Simple lived up to its name with a very easy slow cooker recipe that did not require much prep work (my kind of recipe).  The result was several hours of amazing aromas wafting through the apartment followed by a very tasty dinner.

Our notes:

• We generally cut the recipe in half since there are only two of us; we only used half an onion, one red pepper, and one 14-oz. can of tomatoes.  However, we probably used more than half of the amount of flank steak called for.
• We had an abundance of canned stewed tomatoes in the apartment, so we used those rather than diced tomatoes.  Breaking up the tomatoes a bit before cooking rendered them indistinguishable from the diced variety.
• Cumin was not used.  We don't keep cumin around and I usually don't like buying an ingredient that will probably be used only once.
• Cooking time: 4 hours on high and then intermittently on low and warm (our slow cooker switches to warm when the timer ends; when I remembered to I turned it back to low to cook it a little longer)
• We also did not use fresh cilantro.  While I find cilantro delicious, we figured that the dish would be all right without it (and it was).
• Avocado was a fantastic accompaniment, but then there are very few things that I would not say that about.

Due to extenuating circumstances, we had a small amount of leftovers even a week later, but these were still edible and, more importantly, quite tasty.  Next time I would probably make a full recipe in order to have a better amount of delicious leftovers.

A lot of flavour for not a lot of prep work.  My kind of recipe.