I am so excited to share this Slow Cooker Recipe Book with you! Stephanie over at Mama and Baby Love has written a supremely useful cookbook for busy families. Whether you work or not, you will find these recipes useful. It would also make the perfect gift for an expecting mama or papa. Better still, drop off a prepared recipe all set to go in a gallon Ziploc along with the cookbook! This is easy, good food.
I received a free copy of the ebook and I read through it. Stephanie had suggested that I try one of the recipes and take photos to share as part of my review. You may have noticed that I don’t ever post photos on my blog. Not because I don’t like photos or have 10 trillion images to choose from if I cared to do so, but because I never figured out how to do it. Aha~a challenge!
So here goes. I set about to making the Cinnamon-Cumin Beef Stew, which sounded fabulous. Coincidentally, I had just started a cleanse/elimination diet so I was worried I wouldn’t be able to find a recipe in the book that would meet my needs, but au contraire! I only had to swap out sweet potatoes for white ones and I was all set.
All the recipes are ingeniously portioned for TWO batches so you do a little extra chopping up front, but then you’ve prepared dinner twice in no time. So I chopped the veggies and it looked like this:
Then I cubed the meat and mixed the spices together.
(Dude, why didn’t someone tell me how easy it is to insert photos? Geez!)
Anyway. Then I divided it into two gallon-sized bags.
See how it’s the perfect size for your Crock Pot? (It can’t be one of those tiny round ones though, needs to be the larger oval version.)
Then I popped them both in the freezer. I knew I’d be cooking one the next morning, but I wanted to truly test the whole freeze-then-cook thing to make sure I didn’t run into any issues. The next morning, I pulled it out, tore the bag off, (yeah, you have to sacrifice the bag, but it’s sooo worth it) and viola!
The lid even fit. I set it on low and went to work. Came home to this:
That stew was delicious! Sweet and savory, with just enough heat. Now, I took a little creative license. As I said, I’m on a weird diet so I couldn’t use the white potatoes. I thought I’d do a straight substitution for the sweet potatoes, but then one of them was rotten (the story of my life) so I added some butternut squash that was not rotten along with some onions and celery and it came out just fine. I’m sure that there are many places in the various recipes that you could feel free to improvise.
This cookbook is well organized with shopping lists and detailed instructions. A heads-up to vegetarians that not all, but most of the recipes have meat in them. The meals are easy to prepare, healthy, and with only chopping and assembling as prep, serious time-savers. Again, you can grab the cookbook here for under six dollars! I can’t imagine you would be disappointed in your investment. And if you are a parent and don’t have a slow-cooker yet….go get one!
