Julie Johnson / The BulletinLyyne Alley's "Favorite Chili" is a hearty and well-spiced vegetarian soup that doesn't lack for flavor.

Slow cookers with their low, lengthy, moist heat are ideal for meat recipes. After six to 10 hours in a Crock-Pot or other slow cooker, beef, pork, poultry and the like are fork-tender and flavorful.

But slow cookers can turn out delicious vegetarian meals, too. If that idea makes you envision unappetizing, overcooked veggies, you’re not alone.

“That’s exactly the reaction I got when I proposed this cookbook. But you can make vegetarian meals and they will not turn out mushy,” said Lynn Alley, author of “The Gourmet Vegetarian Slow Cooker: Simple and Sophisticated Meals from Around the World,” a Random House trade paperback.

Alley is a slow-cooker connoisseur, having written other cookbooks on the topic, including “The Gourmet Slow Cooker, Volumes I and II,” and “50 Simple Soups for the Slow Cooker.”

The trick is to add fresh vegetables and fresh herbs to the slow cooker at the end of the cooking time.

You can conveniently plan to have that occur when there’s 30 minutes to an hour to go before dinner.

“The obvious match for the slow cooker is to have beans or grains as your base, because that way you can walk out of the house and go to work for eight hours, and then add fresh veggies at the end and have a great dinner,” Alley said in a phone interview from her home in Carlsbad, California.

In Curried Chickpeas with Fresh Ginger and Cilantro (see recipe), one of the more than 50 recipes in her cookbook, Alley calls for adding sauteed onions and spices to the Indian-style chickpeas after they’ve cooked for six to eight hours, and then continuing to cook the mixture for an additional 30 to 60 minutes.

Right before serving, fresh lemon juice is added to brighten the flavors, along with serrano chile slices and cilantro leaves.

Alley’s cookbook includes recipes she created with inspiration from seven areas around the world: India, Mexico and the Southwest, Asia, Italy, France, Greece and The Middle East.

She has slow-cooker recipes for risottos, polenta, lentils and potatoes as the base, and includes three desserts: Mexican Chocolate Pudding Cake, Red Wine and Cherry Risotto and Walnut and Apple Bread Pudding.

Alley’s Favorite Chili recipe is a mixture of Southwestern and Mexican influences. After dried beans and spices cook for six hours, onions, garlic and canned tomatoes are added, along with more spices, and the chili cooks for two more hours.

“About half an hour before serving, add the red and green bell pepper and corn kernels to the beans so they retain their crisp, fresh taste and texture,” Alley instructs in her chili recipe, guaranteeing nonmushy vegetables.

Alley said most people won’t miss the meat in her chili recipe.

“When I was working on this cookbook, I took my recipes to where I was teaching yoga, and the big test for me was whether the meat eaters liked them. They’d often say, ‘That’s vegetarian? That’s really good.’ Then I knew it was good,” Alley said.

Alley encouraged The Bulletin to include a slow-cooker soup recipe, so Barley, Mushroom and Onion Soup is below. It sounded like a good comfort food for a cool evening.

“Soups work so well in a slow cooker. I loved writing a whole book about slow-cooker soups,” she said.

The barley soup calls for dried porcini mushrooms, but Alley said she often uses whatever looks good to her at the market.

“Sometimes I just used dried mushrooms, sometimes regular, sometimes wild mushrooms. Just add them close to the end of the cooking time, in the last hour or half hour, and that depends on what kind and how you cut them — the smaller the cut, the later they go in,” Alley said.

If you’re assembling a slow-cooker meal in the morning before going to work, take a couple of minutes to chop up the vegetables you’re going to add right before dinner, so all you have to do is toss them in the pot when you get home.

The joy of slow-cooker cookery is walking into the house after a long day and having a delicious dinner almost ready to eat.

Now, when you’re not in the mood for meat, it can be a low-and-slow simmered vegetarian dish that greets you when you come in the door: no fuss and no mush!

— Reporter: ahighberger@mac.com