Success! Today, no stick blending and two hours later the consistency was perfect.
For some reason I chose my full sized crock pot instead of the little 1.5qt I had been using. Glad I did. Even though the recipe was only about two inches worth in the crock pot, at the 45 minute mark, it bubbled to the top and over a little? I had been stirring about every fifteen minutes up to that point, and the overflow happened about five minutes after a stir. When I stirred it all down and scraped up what I could salvage, it stayed down for the rest of the cook. Was this 45 minute reaction the gelling? It did look like Vaseline, and then eventually cooked into a mashed potato look.