This past week, I had a feed from a site that advertises recipe collections where you can assemble all the ingredients for, say, 10 meals at once, and gives you a consolidated ingredient list plus the ten separate recipes. There are a few of these sites around, all geared towards the “busy mom” who can stock pile meals in the freezer and take them out when needed. My wife has had a freezer party or two with her Epicure business, and I think the idea is really solid. In some ways, it is simply assembly line principles applied to dinner prep so that if you’re chopping up meats or veggies, or getting out spices, you do it once instead of 10 separate times with each meal.

For the Epicure meals, it’s more tailored to the individual preparer, so you know what you’re getting. For the sites, usually of the 10 recipes, there are only a few I even like the sounds of, let alone trying them out with a full preparation.  I took the list though, or several lists from the site, and narrowed it down to a few crockpot recipes that sounded both interesting and simple. I confess that I’m looking for some that could be added to the rotation once or twice a month and are worth the effort.

The first one we tried this week was called “Crockpot Honey Mustard Pork Chops and Potatoes”. I said it was simple, and it was — pork chops, onion soup mix, mustard, honey, black pepper, butter and potatoes. Simple to assemble and even simpler for me to say since I did the grocery shopping but Andrea did the assembly in the crockpot in the morning.

The recipe turned out okay, nothing wrong with it, and it looked pretty good.

But it was incredibly bland. And honestly, it was a bit weird with all the butter. It adds a half a stick of butter. That is a LOT of butter. And left a near-oil slick on top of the “broth”. The pork chops were edible, certainly, but the recipe is not worth sharing and not worth repeating. It isn’t even worth starting with as a base to play with other ingredients or adjust elements to make it more interesting.

There are just too many other good recipes out there to waste time on this one again. Guess our cooking attempts can’t all be home runs.