"Is it ready?" said Alfie at ten to four on Tuesday, before he had taken his shoes off. He had followed his nose from the front door to the kitchen, where the house smelled of onions, paprika and sausage and the slow cooker had been ticking away since ten past eight that morning. By 5:34 the oven clock said tea time and the kitchen light was on. The clocks haven't gone back yet, but it's already dark by seven, and the whole house has shifted down a gear.
The slow cooker is from 2014 and has two settings, low and high, and a lid that rattles. I put it on before the school run on my work days, which are Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, and Rob picks up at 3:15 and gets in with the kids to a house that already smells of tea. I measured it with the smart plug in September: on low for nine hours it uses about 1.1 kWh, which at 24.6p is 27p. Add that to each recipe below if you want the full figure; I have.
Sausage and bean casserole
This one is for the days when I have six minutes and a lot of tired. Eight sausages, two onions, a tin of chopped tomatoes, four carrots grated so Alfie can't find them, a tin of baked beans (the beans do most of the sauce, which he accepts because it looks like something he already likes), a stock cube and a spoon of smoked paprika. I brown the sausages in a pan while Isla hunts for a shoe, then everything goes in. Served with mash and frozen peas, because Alfie eats peas only frozen.
The shop for it was £6.40, so £1.60 a portion, and the sausages are £2.99 of that. The sausages go soft by 5:30, which Rob likes and I put up with.
Beef stew with dumplings
The dearest of the three, at £8.60 for four, which is £2.15 a portion. Half a kilo of diced beef is £4.09 on its own. With an onion, carrots, swede, potato and a beef stock cube it is a proper Sunday-roast sort of tea in the middle of the week. The beef is fine for nine hours on low, but the dumplings are not, which I learned last winter, when I put the suet mix in at 8 a.m. and came home to porridge. Now Rob puts the dumplings on top at a quarter to five and turns it up to high. That's the one job in the whole recipe, and he does it with great ceremony.
Red lentil and sweet potato dhal
The cheapest, at £4.60 for four, so £1.15 a portion, with rice. Red lentils, a sweet potato, an onion, a tin of tomatoes, curry powder, and water. Alfie hates anything with bits, so I blitz it with the stick blender just before serving, and what comes out is orange and smooth and he will eat it. Isla likes it with a spoon of yoghurt and a bit of chopped coriander. I use red lentils only in the slow cooker, because other beans and pulses need a hard boil first, and I read the instructions on the packet for those. It is the one tea of the three that we all agree on.
Adding it up, and what went wrong
It hasn't all gone smoothly. I tried a fish pie in the slow cooker in September and it came out grey, so that was the end of that. I have forgotten to plug the thing in, which Rob discovered at ten to four one afternoon with a raw stew and three hungry people, and that evening was pasta. And the first time I made the dhal I put in too much curry powder for Alfie and watched him eat one forkful, drink a whole glass of water and ask if he could have toast. The slow cooker is not a way of not thinking. It is a way of thinking on a Sunday night and getting the benefit on a Tuesday.
I did the maths on a Wednesday, which is Aldi day and so a good day for it. The sausage casserole is £1.60 a portion, the beef stew £2.15 and the dhal £1.15, which averages £1.63 against my usual £1.80 for a home-cooked tea. Add 27p of electricity per tea, which is about 7p a portion, and the average rises to £1.70. That's still under the £7.20 I allow for four people in 2026, and the cheap one pays for the dear one.
The sums: £6.40, £8.60 and £4.60 for three teas, plus 81p of electricity, which is £20.41 for twelve portions, or £1.70 each.
