Crockpot Slow Cooker Recipes: Easy and Delicious Meals for Busy Families | Perfect for Weeknight Dinners & Meal Prep

CROCKPOT COOKING is a smorgasbord of very well written short stories and poems broken down into four courses: Starters, Blue Plate Specials, Flash in the Pan Sides and Poetic Desserts. Starters introduces us to 2 distinct characters in 2 separate stories sharing the common theme of life as an outsiders. Blue Plate Specials is a collection of 10 stories, most of which could be considered coming-of-age stories. Even the stories with adult protagonists seem to be about finding one’s true self or figuring out one’s place in the world. Biggio does a beautiful job depicting an adult world through the eyes of children as they try to make sense of the life they find themselves living. And the stories are all timeless, yet read with a sense of nostalgia as if everything is an almost-distant memory. For the most part, it is easy going from one story to another, perhaps not unlike if one were tasting mashed potatoes and then having a bite of roast pork. However, The Casket Girls, almost startles the reader like a bit of gristle in the gravy. A tale bordering on paranormal, with hints of vampires in New Orleans, the story seems out of place with the rest of the collection. Flash in the Pan Sides are relatively short short stories that depict a variety of people learning to accept and deal with their lives as best they can. Biggio has a masterful hand with these stories, tying them together thematically. We are first introduced to Ollie and Ethel living lives of disappointment in BORROWED TIME. Their story is followed by three unrelated stories about people moving beyond disappointment to get what they want, albeit by intriguing means. And then the section ends with UNDER THE BIG TOP, where disappointment trumps all (except for Ida, who runs away with the circus). Finally, Poetic Desserts ends the book with a collection of poems that at first disappointed me – I had expected something more thematically in line with the book and the poems are of jarringly different subjects. But they are written with a sincere hand and the reader is left feeling satisfied and satiated with the book as a whole.