I carry no phone An aspiring Luddite In a wired world. Mastodon Verification Link	Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, a late adopter of Twitter, and declines to adopt Facebook. With the death of Google+, he migrated to the Fediverse. He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance. He hates cell-phones.

This week's recipe is a bit of an experiment. The results were not entirely unmixed, but satisfactory enough for me to share, and so ...

When summer rears its head, a head not so much ugly as just really hot, the appeal of throwing something in the oven for a few hours diminishes somewhat. Unfortunately, the appeal of eating something which has cooked slowly for a few hours does not diminish proportionally. This leads to work-arounds. The outdoor barbecue, grill or smoker are such work-arounds. They are not suitable for the gratin, however. And I like gratins.

Crock pots are pretty good for summer cooking. They don't fill a kitchen with heat the way an oven does, but they have their own quirks. They are moist heaters, not dry heat like an oven, but often we seal things with lids before sticking them in the oven in order to create a moist environment. I often do that with my gratins. Thusly was I led to wonder if a crock pot gratin was a possibility.

The answer was "yes," at least sort of. And it didn't make my kitchen a thermal nightmare.

• a large onion
• three medium potatoes
• 3 - 4 red turnips, preferably greens still attached
• 3/4 cup whey, stock, water or milk
• a couple of Tbs of cream or crème fraîche
• salt and pepper

Take your turnip greens, or some other greens if you'd rather, cut or chiffonade them, and place them on top. Cover the crock pot, turn it to high and walk away for a few hours.

To serve, scoop the greens off and serve next to the gratin proper. Or don't, see if I care. That's it.

The result was fairly gratin-like. Not as brown and crunchy on top, of course, and moister, but pretty good. And a one pot meal, to boot!

As with so many gratins, you could easily adjust this to your ingredients and specifications. Adding cheese would help it to hold together, if such things matter to you. (Actually, even if it doesn't matter to you, it would still help it hold together.) Other root vegetables would work fine.

Be careful about adding meats, though, or watery vegetables, since the cooking will break them down, and you might end up with a stew. A delicious stew, no doubt, but not something that's much like a gratin.