Every Friday is 11 Things day at Living Behind the Curve.

We’ve had a fair amount of new traffic and subscribers this week, and almost all of it was for our cooking posts and, more specifically, our SRSLY system. No matter where you came from or what page you landed on when you got here, welcome! Please kick off your shoes, raid the fridge (or the slow cooker), and get comfy.

It just so happens that this food-related traffic coincides with our semi-monthly “not cooking” extravaganza. That to me is a clear sign that the planets are in the proper alignment for an 11 Things post dedicated to SRSLY, slow cooking, and general kitchen tips to make dinner (and breakfast and lunch) easy, breezy, beautiful…oh, wait, that’s the wrong commercial. SRSLY slices, dices, and makes Julianne fr…no, that’s not right either.

It’s all about time, folks, of which we all have precious little. Get ready to break out those tennis shoes and run out of the kitchen with these…

11 Things You Can Do to Make Cooking SRSLY Easy

1. The simple adaptability of the SRSLY method allows you to take virtually any slow cooker recipe and prep it the easy way. Take our idea and run with it! Check out Cooking Cache, RecipeZaar, and numerous blogs about slow cooking for ideas.

2. Do yourself a favor and plan ahead. I know, for example, that this weekend we’ll be prepping sweet and sour shin kickers, WTFBBQ, a new citrus and apple pork recipe, beef bourguignon, chili, lasagna, and macaroni and cheese. (The last two aren’t slow cooker recipes, but they are household favorites.) I know how many zip-top bags to have out, how many mushrooms to chop, and how much time we need. Because of the planning I’ve done, I expect that our prep (which will take about 2 hours) will be done before we head off to a picnic on Saturday afternoon.

3. While you’re doing all that planning, keep an eye on quantities and purposely create leftovers. Not only are they great for lunches, individual serving-sized quantities can be frozen and kept on hand for those nights when nobody wants to cook. (We all have them, and leftover stew is much better than a quart of ice cream.)

4. Your family and friends will appreciate the calm, zen-like state you achieve with the by-product of SRSLY, slow cooker aromatherapy. The only thing better than coming home to the smell of dinner wafting through your house is knowing that it’s real food, that it cooked itself while you were out, and that it requires minimal cleanup. That combination is enough to soothe even the most savage beast.

5. While we’re on the subject of pleasant aromas, I highly recommend that you familiarize yourself with your spice cabinet.  Knowing what spices taste like, what effect they have on certain dishes, and what you have hidden behind that 15-year-old tin of Old Bay are the key to making good dishes spectacular.  Find a dish that you make regularly, and make a minor tweak to the spices each time you make it, until eventually you get a “wow!” reaction.  It may become your signature dish.

6.  Another tool to add to your kitchen arsenal is a lack of fear.  It is OK to experiment and try new things, even if you screw up.  Some of our more interesting accidental creations have been hot dog and pea risotto, ramen latkes, and lasagna-free lasagna, which is what we had for dinner tonight.

To make lasagna-free lasagna, boil up whatever pasta you have handy.  (We used macaroni.)  In a microwave-safe bowl, combine 4 parts ricotta cheese, 2 parts shredded mozarella, and 1 part grated parmesan.  Season with your choice of spices (we prefer garlic, onion, basil, and oregano) and stir in 2 parts tomato sauce.  Mix well and microwave on 50% power for 10 minutes.  Serve over pasta.  Quick, easy, delish, and a complete gamble on our part.

7. Take that lack of fear and use it to bend your mind around the outside of a cubical container (think outside the box).  I love lasagna (can you tell?), but I hate boiling noodles just to prep a casserole.  Long before pasta companies started making special “no-boil” lasagna, I was making my own raw lasagna.  To this day, I make it this way, and I can’t believe anyone pays extra for those silly pleated noodles.

To make raw lasagna,  grease a 13×9″ pan.  Make 3 cups of your favorite lasagna filling (I use eggs, ricotta, parm, mozzarella, and spices) and set aside.  Pour 1 cup of your preferred tomato sauce into the bottom of the pan.  Layer raw (traditional) lasagna noodles on top of the sauce, breaking noodles if necessary to cover the bottom of the pan.  Do not overlap.  Top with 1 cup sauce.  Add a cup of your cheese filling, spreading evenly over the noodles.  Top with 1 cup sauce, noodles, 1 cup sauce, 1 cup cheese, 1 cup sauce, noodles, 1 cup sauce, 1 cup cheese, noodles, and finish with 1 1/2 cups sauce.  Cover tightly with foil and rest overnight in the refrigerator.  Bake for 1 hour at 350 degrees.  Remove foil and top with shredded mozzarella cheese; return to oven for an additional 20 minutes or until cheese is GBD.  This recipe uses a bit more sauce than traditional lasagna, but it’s necessary because that’s where the noodles get their water to cook.  The result is a tight, dense lasagna that holds together very well.

8. Learn which foods are worth your time, and which aren’t.  For example, I always, always, always buy frozen pre-chopped onions.  It’s more expensive than cutting them myself, but cutting onions is such as hassle that it’s worth the extra money to me.  Instead of dragging out a cutting board, pausing to clear my eyes, and cursing the fact that I don’t even like onions, I just open a bag and dump it into another bag.  Easy peasy.  I also adore raw broccoli, and I’ve found the the price per pound at our local grocer is lower on pre-cut florets than it is on whole heads of broccoli, once you figure in the loss to stems.  (I’ll eat chopped, peeled stems steamed, but not raw.)  As my mom likes to say, “keep your eyes peeled.”

9. Impress your friends!  My co-workers are constantly amazed at the yumminess I bring to work every day.  They don’t understand how I have the time to cook *and* work *and* be a student.  I’ve tried explaining, but they don’t seem to grasp the wonders of slow cooking.  They remain, however, completely jealous of my goodies.  I just smile and eat my shortribs.

10. Use the gift of time!  Since we started SRSLY, I estimate that we’ve gained about 8 hours every week that was lost to cooking and cleaning up after dinner.  That’s enough time to take a class at your local community college, start a new hobby, play with your kids, start meditating, start exercising, hit the local library, or just sit on your ass and contemplate the crockery.  It doesn’t matter what you do — it matters that you can.

11. Become an Internet superstar.  Well, not quite.  Maybe a fleck of dust in the ring of one of the Internet’s moons?  We’re always experimenting with new SRSLY recipes, but we can only do so much before we run out of ideas.  Plus, we can only eat the same 20-dinner rotation for so long before it gets tiring and we head for the Hot Pockets section of the frozen foods aisle.

So, dear readers, we implore you: send us your SRSLY/slow cooker recipes, and save us from crock pot monotony!  We’ll credit you, link back to your blog or website, and praise your name when we ladle your dish out of our cooker.   (Quality of praise not guaranteed.)  Submit your recipes here, or email interact at living behind the curve dot com.

Also, if you have any questions about SRSLY, or have any suggestions of what we can add to the FAQ, we’d love to hear from you.

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I’ll be back on Monday with a freezer full of SRSLY goodness and part 2 of my post on health insurance and my plans to cash out my 401(k).

Enjoy your weekend!