The Clever Secret To Cooking 2 Dishes In Your Slow Cooker At Once

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The slow cooker is a gift to mankind, allowing you to throw in a host of ingredients in the morning and return home to a perfectly cooked dinner. If you're looking to increase variety in your meal without doubling the effort, there's an easy way to split the cooking in your slow cooker.

Buying or making a slow cooker divider and placing it in the middle of your pot will allow for two meals to cook simultaneously. You can make your own using aluminum foil (the regular variety works fine, but heavy duty aluminum foil is a safer bet). Whichever type of foil you use, it's better to layer up as the key to this hack is keeping the food separate. After a while in the slow cooker, thinner foil may bend and lose its stability. 

Simply mold or cut your foil to fit the entire width of the slow cooker, and place it in snugly. Your foil should look like a "Z", with the top and bottom representing the stabilizing folds. You can also incorporate two separate slow cooker liners, though this may not be necessary, depending on what you're cooking. Making some garlic dinner rolls alongside fluffy mashed potatoes will ensure two delicious sides that won't impact the other as they cook, only coming together on your dinner plate.

Two types of vegetables won't need extra separation since they should safely stay on their own side. For saucier foods, the liners will be more useful, unless you don't mind a bit of mixing. Meats will also be fine with just the foil divider, though you may want to reinforce the foil if you plan on covering the meat with a sauce. 

Dips are one of the best ways to utilize this hack as you end up with two warm additions and hardly any mess. Over-filling your slow cooker is a common mistake people make, but as long as you aren't filling it past three-quarters full, this shouldn't be a problem. Also, you can choose slow cooker bags of different sizes to avoid making too much. The risk isn't just that the food can mix, it can spill over altogether and leave a huge mess.

Keep in mind there's always a risk for the food mixing together if you go the DIY route, so if you're cooking anything that contains common allergens (or any food alongside meat) it's best to check with your fellow diners before trying this hack. If in doubt, throw the food into liners before cooking.