crockpot

Slow Cooker Healthy Turkey and Sweet Potato Chili with Quinoa

Comfort food chili cravings never tasted so healthy, until now. This easy CrockPot chili is protein-packed with lean ground turkey, light and dark kidney beans, plus quinoa for an extra safety-net protein source that will keep you filled and full all day long and into the night.

The BEST Turkey Chili

It’s 5:30 p.m. and the sun has set behind the mountains and the sky has already settled into dark. There’s a chill is in the air and comfort food is what we’re all craving now. Turkey Pot Pie? Mac and Cheese? Sausage Lasagna? All delicious in their own right, but not exactly the lightest of fare.

And now that the fall season is here, the wrangling and jostling for the T.V. remote has begun. The World Series? (go Dodgers!). The Voice? (I’m with J-Hud Productions). More tears and tissues while crying with This Is Us? (I mean, seriously!) Or finally, a new Walking Dead? (My Smudge and I are convinced our Big Daddy should be Negan for Halloween.)

Our television viewing habits are as hotly debated as what sounds best for dinner.

But tonight, there’s one less argument to make because Big Mama (that’s me) thought ahead (for once) and put dinner in the slow cooker. And just like that, a healthy dinner is served.

And surprise, AliSmudge and Big Daddy don’t even complain that it’s oh-so good for them. But why would they? This turkey sweet potato chili is delish! And better yet, it’s so simple to make.continue to the recipe… about Slow Cooker Healthy Turkey and Sweet Potato Chili with Quinoa

Vegetarian Crockpot Lasagna Soup

This crockpot lasagna soup is like a deconstructed lasagna made in an Italian tomato broth full of vegetables with a creamy dollop of a three cheeses mixed in.

This recipe is brought to you by DeLallo Foods

Vegetarian Crockpot Lasagna Soup

If you’ve found yourself trolling Pinterest, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve seen the meaty stove-top version of this easy vegetarian lasagna soup floating around. And there’s a perfectly good reason for that.

Because it’s so dang good!

I’m very much into giving my favorite comfort foods a different spin to make them brand new again. And when it comes to lasagna, I have a couple of recipe twists on this classic Italian comfort food up my sleeve, or at least, in my recipe box.

This time around, a healthy change-up to everyone else’s lasagna soup was in the works. To make the soup even simpler to make while coordinating the fam’s busy schedules, I took this vegetarian lasagna soup from the stove to the crockpot for cooking with ease.

Slow cooking makes lasagna soup easy to make any night of the week, and it can be made with the slow cooker function on the Instant Pot too.

continue to the recipe… about Vegetarian Crockpot Lasagna Soup

31 Instant Pot Dinner Recipes to Make in October

These 31 recipe ideas for the Instant Pot are perfect for whipping up homemade dinners on the fly this month!

Happy October!

For our tenth installment of our 31 Days Series, we’re simplifying with the all-in-one magical unicorn workhorse Instant Pot. If you’re a little late to the party, the Instant Pot is the newfangled version of the pressure cooker, and if you don’t have one yet, you likely have major appliance envy, because this baby is the Beyoncé of kitchen appliances.

I’m telling you now…there isn’t a single appliance I’ve loved more since I got my Instant Pot last year than this and my friends and family can all vouch for this because I think they’re sick of hearing me talk about its virtues. And if you don’t believe me, believe Amazon, where it was the #3 best-selling product on 2017’s Amazon Prime Day.

But really, it does it all. The thing I love about it most is you can actually sear meats, chicken, vegetables in it before using the slow cooker or pressure cooker function so you get all that good flavor and don’t have to dirty any extra pots! It’s the true one and done.

It’s user-friendly, often cuts our average cooking duration in half, makes perfectly peelable hard boiled eggs!!!!, and it is a powerful force when it comes to weekly meal planning. What’s not to be totally smitten with? Things are getting pretty serious and all of our other appliances are getting jealous, but we #cantstopwontstop now.

If you don’t have yours yet, here’s an affiliate link, but seriously…this isn’t a sponsored post, I just love this machine and I don’t know anyone else who’s bought it who doesn’t love it too.

**UPDATED: I JUST received an e-mail that tomorrow, Oct. 2, 2017, you can get the Instant Pot for $30 off — that’s just $69!!!! — at the one day sale on Amazon!

Click here to buy the Instant Pot Duo 7-in-1 Multi-Use Programmable Pressure Cooker, 6 Quart (limit of 5 for the sale price on Oct. 2, 2017)

Instant Pot, we love you. Thank you for making our lives eternally easier and our kitchen sink considerably emptier.

continue to the recipe… about 31 Instant Pot Dinner Recipes to Make in October

Crushing on Gina Homolka of Skinnytaste & Her Slow Cooker Chicken Enchilada Soup

How does the cook in the family shed a few pounds while making a meal the whole family will still crave and love? In Gina Homolka’s mind, it’s simple. You just need to get into the kitchen and start cooking.

The challenges of weight loss has been a universal struggle that has made the popularity of Gina’s blog, Skinnytaste, the success that it is since it’s beginnings in 2008. And it’s the same exact reason her new cookbook has soared to the tops of the best-seller lists.

As the creator of both publishing endeavors, Gina Homolka has found the secret ingredient that resonates with her readers: she solves cooking conundrums for dieters by delivering calorie conscious, but still totally crave-worthy, lightened-up family favorite recipes that are painless to plan and create. In fact her Fettuccine Alfredo with Chicken and Broccoli clocks in at just 420 calories per serving. Say what?

Now with her first cookbook, The Skinnytaste Cookbook, legions of devout fans are going offline and straight to the cookbook shelves to discover recipes that she calls, “light on calories, big on flavor.”

This Slow Cooker Chicken Enchilada Soup is just one of the many of Gina’s recipes that have been tested, tasted and high five approved and I’m sharing the recipe, plus a giveaway for a copy of The Skinnytaste Cookbook, with you today.

Let’s dig in!