Although the recipes are lovely, too many of them (at least half!) have cooking times of 4 or 5 hours. So for the wonderful breakfast casserole, I'm supposed to get up at 4 a.m. to put it together for breakfast at 8? What were they possibly thinking? And I'm also supposed to run home from work at 2 p.m. to put dinner on for 6 p.m. that night? Huh? Maybe these recipes are supposed to appeal to folks who don't have jobs, and are free to start the meal at anytime (althought the 4 a.m. breakfast recipe still puzzles me). But are they really the folks who use slow cookers? Most of us want recipes that cook for at least 8 hours, so that we can put them on before we go to work and have them ready and waiting when we get home. Maybe someone at Southern Cooking needs a reality check.

Slow cookers aren't just for main dishes, though over the years that's what they've come to be associated with: they can offer entire meals from soup and appetizers to dessert - and SOUTHERN LIVING SLOW-COOKER COOKBOOK is here to make the most of them, using their Test Kitchen pros' experiments to produce polished, guaranteed results and original dishes not to be found in competing cookbooks. Bright color photos accompany recipes which are also labeled by type i.e. 'Comfort Food', 'Editor's Choice', and 'Company's Coming'. What's for dinner from a slow cooker? Perhaps Chicken Lasagna Florentine, Steak Soup or even Apple Crisp. Over 200 recipes are presented.

Diane C. Donovan, Editor
California Bookwatch

This cookbook is absolutely wonderful! It runs circles around the Betty Crocker slow cooker cookbooks. I've tried several recipes, including the oatmeal, pulled pork, and breakfast casserole recipes, and they were all fantastic. This book contains a huge variety of recipes for everything from breakfast to dessert, but it does not scrimp on great dinner recipes. My life is so much easier now that I've re-discovered my slow cooker and this cookbook! Great variety of recipes, great pictures, and beautiful!