Sounds a bit arsey, but I'd steer away from recipes that are touted as being specifically for slow cookers, especially the ones that tell you to whack all the ingredients in raw.
It's a really good tool if the recipe calls for a long, slow cook, but you can't skip the initial cooking of things like meat, aromatics and spices because that's where a lot of the flavour is created. I just work with normal recipes and when it calls for a long, low cook I get the crockpot out.
That said, there is a bit of an art to getting the most out of a slow cooker. The newer ones cook at a deceptively high heat (even on low) and they will really decimate certain foods. For example, cooking normal rolled porridge oats in a modern slow cooker overnight will just result in a homogeneous sludge. If you want a decent overnight slow cooker porridge you need to get hold of pinhead (also known as steel cut) oats, which you'll typically only find at health shops and farm stores nowadays.
Picking the right meat can be tricky too. I'd definately say for a slow cooker chilli that you should be using chunks of something like beef chuck or shin rather than beef mince. Something like brisket would also work (common slow cooker fodder), but you wouldn't get the glossiness as it doesn't have much collagen in it, and the meat can go a little dry and stringy.
cant for the life of me understand why!
