Slow Cooker Meals for Busy Parents

For the past few weeks, my wife and I have been trying out using our slow cooker to make our dinners every night. If you are a parent with a small child or have older children and remember those times, you know that trying to accomplish anything at home while caring for and keeping an eye on a crawling, babbling baby can be difficult on the best days. Add to that trying to renovate a home that was previously a foreclosure, and you quickly run out of time to do anything else in the house. including making dinner. The end result was us picking up fast food far more often than we wanted, but without time to prepare diner every night, changing this pattern was not something that could be done easily.

White Chicken Chili in our slow cooker.

Homemade Dinner Every Night in One Hour a Week

My wife came across some recipes or slow cooker meals on Pinterest, ones that boast only two hours of prep time once every two weeks, and delicious meals every night. All meals are put into plastic bags, put into the freezer, so the only work that is required is to remember to take out a bag in the morning and put the food into the slow cooker six to eight hours before you want you meal to be ready. It is really a great way to eat delicious meals for dinner every night, while still having enough time to care for a child and maybe even renovate a kitchen.

So like I said, it has been a couple weeks since we started making the slow cooker / Crock Pot meals, and we have had decent success.  There have been some winners and some losers, one being particularly delicious, while another being particularly disgusting.  I was actually very hopeful for one of the meals, only to be seriously disappointed with the results. In fact, my entire house stunk of what I can only describe as Cat Feces a la Litter Box.  It did end up tasting marginally better, but not something that I would describe as good or something I would let me dog eat.
Overall, though, the experiment has gone well, and as we go through them I will be sure to post about the good ones, and maybe about some of the bad ones.  One nice aspect to using your slow cooker / Crock Pot to make dinner every night is minimal cleanup.  Even if you one of the unfortunate souls that does not have a dishwasher, you just have to be sure to clean out the slow cooker every night so it is ready for the next day.  We have, so far, been much more willing to eat dinner at home, and I now have more and better leftovers for lunch at work.  This really is a great idea, especially since you can make just about anything you want for dinner easily, without having to resort to heating up food in the microwave.

Meals Reviewed

• Slow Cooker French Dip with Horseradish and Au Jus
• Slow Cooker White Chicken Chili