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With fine restaurants cashing in on $30 entrées of braised short ribs and other elevated peasant fare, smart home cooks are rethinking a long-neglected appliance: the slow cooker.

Long associated with the era of avocado-toned kitchen appliances and tuna casseroles, the slow cooker - a.k.a. the Crock-Pot - is back, transforming cheap, tough cuts of meat, or cheap, tough legumes for that matter, into fashionable home dinners.

All while you're at the office or out running errands.

Because slow cookers operate at temperatures just high enough for food safety and low enough not to be a fire hazard, they can bubble away untended for hours at a time.

Television executive Deborah Lewis has noticed Crock-Pot creep in her downtown Toronto crowd, one more accustomed to dining out, taking out or ordering in.

"Everyone I know is Crock-Potting it up," Ms. Lewis says. She and her boyfriend recently cooked their first slow cooker dinner for a restaurateur and his wife, "the king and queen of fancy," as Ms. Lewis describes them. They stuck with classic goulash served over egg noodles.

Manufacturers have, of course, noticed the renaissance and are advertising their wares in haute foodie magazines such as Gourmet.

Hamilton Beach, for one, reports selling 35 per cent more slow cookers in 2007 than in the previous year. They've designed new oval sizes, stainless steel exteriors and high-tech features such as timers and built-in meat thermometers.

Even the purveyors of prepackaged foods are getting in on the trend, with premixed frozen stews to be thawed and simmered over eight to 10 hours, such as McCain Slow Cooker Solutions.

For those happy to do their own prep, cookbooks are expanding their offerings, too. Elizabeth Baird's latest book under the Canadian Living umbrella, Make It Tonight, includes a chapter on slow cooking. And while there are trendy offerings such as short ribs in red wine sauce, Ms. Baird is adamant that the Crock-Pot be used for what it does best: moist, stew-type dishes.

In fact, she blames ill-conceived experimentation for sending the slow cooker out of fashion in the 1980s.

"It's like when the microwave was coming out - people were trying to do everything with it," she says.

Ottawa dietitian Hélène Charlebois says she rediscovered the slow cooker a little over eight months ago, and undertook a marathon weekend cooking session in which she made chili, spaghetti sauce and apple compote.

Another simple yet modern take on the slow cooker in Ms. Baird's cookbook is a recipe for chicken stock, which is a brilliant idea if you've ever tried to speed up making chicken stock on a weeknight. Instead of rushing to finish dinner, tossing the carcass and veggies in a pot and hoping for maximum flavour extraction by bedtime, the stock can simmer overnight.

Ms. Baird says the Crock-Pot has always been a problem solver. Her parents would use theirs on holiday in Florida to make baked beans outside their trailer, thereby keeping it cool inside. She's the opposite: "When it gets cold, that's when I want to use it."

For women such as Ms. Lewis, trawling the Internet for Betty Crocker recipes offers a kitschy but satisfying alternative to her usual catered fêtes.

"It's a return to simplicity," she says, albeit one that allows her to stay just as busy. For her dinner party, Ms. Lewis awoke at 7 a.m. and spent 20 minutes chopping and filling her Crock-Pot. Then she dashed out to get a manicure, flowers and a pair of flats she had on hold at a shoe store. "I can throw it into my routine."

Ms. Charlebois has incorporated her new obsession into her work, developing slow cooker dishes for her clients that feature lower fat and lower salt, and acting as a spokeswoman for Hamilton Beach.

She coaches her heart patients that a slow cooker meal is just as convenient as the often less healthy takeout or frozen dinners.

But it's not all warm and fuzzy in the slow cooker community. There is a divisive battle over the merits of peeking and stirring, since lifting the lid on a slow cooker dials you back 20 minutes of cooking.

Ms. Baird, for instance, is firm on her position: "No peeking."

Other expert rules include making sure the cooker is half-filled with liquid to start and not adding green peppers until the end because they'll add a bitter flavour. If a recipe calls for browning meat before you pitch it in, do it. Layer the ingredients that take the longest to cook on the bottom. Oh, and leave the thing on your counter or you'll never use it.

And how did the goulash trial go for Ms. Lewis? After 10 hours of it bubbling away, she says it was delicious. The plate wasn't exactly beautiful, she says, but her guests were just happy to be eating home-cooked food.

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PICK A POT: FROM SIMPLE TO DELUXE

BASIC $59.99

HAMILTON BEACH STAY AND GO

Has a clip-tight lid and a lid rest. Dishwasher-safe stoneware and lid. Six-quart capacity. hamiltonbeach.ca.

MID-RANGE $129.99

CROCK-POT VERSAWARE PRO

Has a digital touchpad for programming cooking time and temperature. Stoneware is safe for oven and microwave. Six-quart capacity. Available at Home Outfitters across Canada.

HIGH END $299.95

ALL-CLAD DELUXE SLOW COOKER

Non-stick aluminum insert goes from stovetop to slow cooker. Digital timer. Dishwasher safe. Seven-quart capacity. Available at Williams-Sonoma across Canada.