Things slow cookers are and aren't good for

Things that slow cookers are brilliant for:

1. The top virtue of having a slow cooker is being able to make homemade chicken stock that's rich and delicious but doesn't half evaporate the way it can if you do it on the stove in a pot. I feel sorry for anyone who has to buy chicken broth. Why spend a few dollars when you can get your own for free, provided you've made a whole chicken recently? Or you can make vegetable broth from your old vegetable peelings and whatever old vegetables you have lying around looking a bit sad and wilty.
2. Slow cookers are also wonderful for making dried beans. Canned beans are cheap; dried beans are practically free. Some beans (black-eyed peas and black beans, for example) don't need any soaking, and some take less time to cook than others. But for really hard, long-cooking beans like chickpeas, a slow cooker is great because you can throw them in and forget about them all night and all day. Simply soak your chickpeas in lots of water overnight in the stoneware of your slow cooker. The next morning, drain them and rinse them off. (Don't be tempted to cook them in the soaking water. Beans release some kind of...gas thing...I don't really know what it is, but you mustn't do it. You've been warned.) Fill the stoneware up with fresh water, turn the slow cooker on low, and cook them all day. Or cook the on high for three hours or so.
3. Stews with cheap cuts of meat. The ones that have lots of connective tissue and fat, etc. These respond really well to slow cooking, because all the nasty bits more or less melt away. The meat falls apart off the bones. It's tender and delicious. Best of all, the cheapest bits of meat work best here. You don't want to cook a more expensive cut, like a pork tenderloin, all day in the slow cooker, because it'll just dry out. The cheaper the better here, I think.
4. Tomato pasta sauces. The kind that need a lot of simmering. The flavors get so much richer with slow cooking at a low temperature, even when the quality of your tomatoes would shock an Italian nonna.

Things that don't work at all... You know, there were certain recipes that I really, really wanted to work in a slow cooker. But they don't.

1. Bread in the slow cooker--it sounded like a low-maintenance dream. But the texture comes out all wrong and it doesn't brown--you have to put it in the oven under the broiler anyway.
2. Anything involving putting uncooked pasta in. I'm sorry, pasta is just better when cooked perfectly al dente the old-fashioned way in a large pot of boiling salty water. I really wanted lasagna to work in the slow cooker, too, but it's just not as good as making it in the oven. It just isn't.
3. Onions. I heard you could caramelized onions in a slow cooker, so I tried it. The texture comes out all wrong, and the taste is watered-down and dull.
4. Oatmeal. I know a lot of people like making overnight steel-cut oats in a slow cooker, but I find it rather like eating some awful sort of glue. I have a much better way of making overnight oats. You should try it.