I love my crockpot! Soups, stews, roasts, even bbq meats with veges taste flavorful and make the house smell great! Also takes the "dinner rush" pressure off if you can put it together in your spare moments and serve it up later. For an easy and fancy dinner party, I get a lot of compliments about my "Beef Wellington with Bearnaise sauce" recipe I got from my best friend. I love pulling out my grandmother's recipes from my recipe card box (yes, I still use one of THOSE!) because even though she's left us, she's always with me when I see the cards written in her handwriting and reminisce about the times we shared these foods with her at family gatherings. I can still picture her standing over her stove cooking up "Gommy's Sweet and Sour Green Beans" while the men were watching a football game in the other room. Just the smell of the onions and bacon cooking in my skillet brings back memories of her. When I sit across the table from my 6 year old who finally has little to say because his mouth is full and he tells me that "this is the best dinner ever, you should make this again", and my husband agrees! As a new bride with no cooking experience,I tried to make sweet and sour meatballs using only ingredients I had on hand. The recipe called for a lot of stuff I didn't have, but thought I could substitute. My husband was being as polite as he could by saying, "maybe it will taste better than it smells". I served it up and neither of us could swallow even one bite. I tried to salvage the meal by rinsing the sauce off of the meatballs and putting ketchup on them, but the strange taste had permeated the meat. We ordered a pizza and I scraped a few into the dog's dish before throwing the rest away. You know it's bad when the dog runs over to her food dish, takes a few sniffs and runs away without tasting it! LOL!!! By the way, I learned a lot from that lesson! Besides being more careful about your substitution choices, if a recipe calls for coriander, it's never a good idea to use the little balls in a meatball recipe without grinding them up first!