A new recipe

One of the bits of service I do (as in: service to other people/the community) is cooking for the college-student ministry at my church. It varies in number between 6 and 20, so I always plan for the upper number and tell the person who runs it just to send any leftovers home with people. Part of this is that many of our students are far from home - so they don't get home cooking that someone else cooked (and I know how that can be an important thing). And some of them are financially insecure, trying to make it on a shoestring, and might not always get substantial meals. So I don't mind spending a little more to get "good" ingredients or to make something a little more special.

This week, though.

When I realized that I had signed up for the same day as my checkup, I was in a quandry - my co-worker and I had agreed upon sloppy joes (with me making the joes, as I have Tuesday afternoons free and she does not) and then her getting the veggies and dessert and chips.

But I figured: this MUST be something that could be done in a slow-cooker once you brown the meat, no? None of my cookbooks on slow-cooking had a recipe, so I looked online.

An aside: I know A Thing now is recipe bloggers writing long, long backstories for their recipes, and people mocking that online (And I can't be one to talk about that; I have no one to listen to me in my day to day life so I get very wordy here). And she does it. But there is a button to "print the recipe" and it just gives you the recipe, on two pages, landscape format:

slow-cooker sloppy joes.

Super simple to make: brown the meat and an onion, everything else is just opening cans or measuring and you then throw it all in the slow cooker. I doubled the recipe, which I figure will make enough for 16 people (they had 12 last week I think). And anyway: leftovers to send home with the kids.

I took a quick taste after it was done just to be sure it was good enough - seeing as it was a new to me recipe. It is. It's very good. More of a BBQ beef style sloppy joe than a "meat and onions and peppers" sloppy joe - I don't like green pepper myself, but I do like barbecue things. So I'm gonna hang on to the recipe; it might also be good some time if my department ever does a lunch where I need to make a fast and "stays hot for a while" main dish.