The Crock-Pot Ladies Big Book of Slow Cooker Dinners: More Than 300 Fabulous and Fuss-Free Recipes for Families on the Go

by Heidi Kennedy, Katie Handing, and Sarah Ince

The Crock-Pot Ladies Big Book of Slow Cooker Dinners is a lifetime of delicious dinner ideas that are as easy to make as they are flavorful.

The Crock-Pot Ladies walk the walk of raising busy families and feeding them well. Meet Heidi, Katie, and Sarah, three awesome cooks who preside over households that together include ten children along with a variety of husbands, grandchildren, and other relatives—all while they maintain super-busy work-at-home schedules that fill most of each day.

The hundreds of thousands of readers of their wildly popular website, Crock-Pot Ladies, rely on them for nutritious and tasty recipes that deliver variety over monotony, comfort over pretense, and, above all, quick prep work over laboriously fancy productions.

In this book, their first, featuring 275 recipes—over half of which are brand new and not available on their website—the Crock-Pot Ladies use easy-to-shop-for, available-anywhere ingredients to build terrific soups and stews, dips and spreads, sides and casseroles, and, especially, protein-packed main courses for big appetites. Experts at cooking for the freezer, the Ladies serve up 25 freezer meal plans, covering 5-, 7-, and 10-day plans, that use the many freezer-friendly recipes in the book.

Nobody knows Crock-Pots and other slow cookers like the Crock-Pot Ladies, and The Crock-Pot Ladies Big Book of Slow Cooker Dinners is chock-full of tips and tricks that show you how to get the most from any model or size of slow cooker. This is a book you can rely on, day in and day out, weekdays and weekends, for fabulous dinners that don't demand time that you don't have.

• ISBN13: 9781558329249
• Publish Date: 17 January 2019 (first published 18 December 2018)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 2 May 2023
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Harvard Common Press,U.S.
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 328
• Language: English

Reviews

[annieb123]

Originally published on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

The Crock-Pot Ladies Big Book of Slow Cooker Dinners is a new recipe collection from cooking/lifestyle blog team at CrockPotLadies. Released 15th Jan 2019 by Quarto on their Harvard Common Press imprint, it's 328 pages, and available in ebook and paperback formats.

My family is fairly typical of a lot of families with older teen/twenties kids living at home, two parents working full time and very little time left over for long and involved meal prep. My slow cooker and instant-pot have become some of my best friends in the kitchen. It's really tempting to pick up the same things at the grocery store and prepare the same dinners week in and week out. I'm seriously not exaggerating when I say that this book has challenged my family to change up our dinners and get away from the same old things.

There are some really delightful regional dishes represented here. There are the staple southwestern USA dishes (the chicken enchilada soup - p.66 is delicious and we've made it a dozen times in the last few months), lots of Italian American fusion dishes, minestrone, tomato soup with gnocchi, and others, as well as a welcome handful of Asian inspired dishes also with an American flair. I haven't seen many seafood based slow cooker recipes, and this cookbook has them. The lobster bisque (p.50) is -gorgeous-.

The ingredients are slanted toward North American readers; sourcing some of them might be challenging other places in the world. I live in Northern Europe and didn't have trouble finding the ingredients for the recipes we tested, so it's not likely to be an impossible hurdle in other parts of the world. Recipes are given in imperial measurements with metric equivalents in parentheses, so the reader is spared from having to convert.

Just a fun and delicious comprehensive slow cooker cookbook. There are lots of selections which are not soups or stews, which is great. This collection shows the versatility of slow cookers. The recipes are sensible and the entire aesthetic of the book is family friendly and wholesome. Is there anything in here that's going to make cordon bleu chefs swoon? No. Are these family friendly and appetizing meals with easily sourced ingredients which even your picky ten year old will eat without drama? Yes.

Five stars. Definitely worthwhile. Of the recipes we've tried, there hasn't been a single clunker.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes