The great healthy slow cooker book : 32 delicious, nutritious recipes for every meal and every size of machine

82 Pages·2013·0.97 MB·English

by  Weinstein

Copyright © 2013 by Mark Scarbrough and Bruce Weinstein
Photographs copyright © 2013 by Mark Scarbrough and Bruce
Weinstein
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an
imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House
LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
www.clarksonpotter.com
CLARKSON POTTER is a trademark and POTTER with colophon is a
registered trademark of Random House LLC.
eISBN 978-0-8041-8526-4
Book design by Jan Derevjanik
Cover design by James Massey
v3.1
contents INTRODUCTION
Breakfast
Quinoa and Millet Porridge with Dried Apricots
Oat, Barley, and Date Porridge
Cinnamon Pear Sauce
Tortilla Strata with Artichokes and Goat Cheese
Meat and Poultry
Ground Beef, Brown Rice, and Tomato Casserole
Barbecued Flank Steak with Sweet Potatoes
Beef Shanks with Barley and Mushrooms
Pork Chops with Pears and Leeks
Lamb Casserole with Garlic and Rosemary
Chicken Barley Risotto
Chicken with Walnuts and Pomegranate
Chicken Drumsticks with Ginger and Star Anise
Chicken, Bean, and Beer Chili
Turkey and Wild Rice–Stuffed Peppers
Fish and Shellfish
Salmon Roasted with Green Olives, Lemon, and Tarragon
Thick Fish Fillets with Parsnips and Garlic
Steamed Whole Fish in Ginger Broth
Barramundi with Caponata and Ros‘ Wine
Scallops with Apples and White Wine
Mussels in a Carrot Ginger Sauce
Vegetable Soups and Vegetable Dishes
Zucchini Soup with Corn and Coriander
Carrot Soup with Garlic and Nutmeg
Triple-Ginger Red Lentil Soup
Wheatberry and Brussels Sprouts Soup
Tofu and Shallots
Curried Spinach with Cheese
Quinoa Pilaf with Bell Peppers and Chickpeas
White Beans with Green Chiles and Tomatillos
Desserts
Applesauce Brownie Cake
Fig and Honey Clafouti
Stewed Apples
Coconut and Pistachio Rice Pudding
introduction
The slow cooker has long been the go-to American tool for satisfying
dinners that are also fuss free. Put on a pot of stew, go off to your
day, and come home to a meal. It sure sounds like heaven to us—and
after slow cooking our way through 500 recipes in our new book, The
Great American Slow Cooker Book, we’re more convinced than ever
that the slow cooker can offer a solution for most kitchen problems.
But ease and convenience aren’t this appliance’s only attributes. A
slow cooker can also turn out some wonderfully healthy fare. After
all, you don’t need much added fat in most slow cooker recipes—and
even none at all in some. Maybe you’ll use a tablespoon of butter or
olive oil to soften some onions in a skillet before they get dumped
into the cooker, but that’s about the end of it. In fact, the slow cooker
extracts so much flavor and richness from the ingredients under its
lid that including too much fat can actually mute the remarkably
wide range and turn the dish unappealingly oily.
Since the slow cooker takes away so much of the traditional
workload at the stove or even the cutting board, you can skip the
processed gimmicks and devote your energy to using real food in
healthy recipes. Slow cooker meals can be tasty and healthy without
chemical-laced processed-food tricks like fat-free sauces or sugar-
free marinades. Because of the way the flavors meld slowly over
time, you can use the good stuff—and actually less of it. You can
dump a few key ingredients into the cooker and create a pretty fine
sauce around, say, pork chops or beef shanks, all without having to
resort to bottled gravies or powdered instant sauces.
And the slow cooker solves one of the biggest problems for us on-
the-go people who still want to eat healthy meals: the siren song of
processed meals at 7:00 p.m., when we’ve dashed in from work. It’s
easy to nuke a frozen dinner into some semblance of a meal when
we’re famished at the end of the day. And it’s even easier to pick up a
we’re famished at the end of the day. And it’s even easier to pick up a
bag of hot fast-food fare on the way home. How can a counter loaded
with raw ingredients compete with that? Maybe it can’t, but we’re
sure that frozen dinners and fast-food burgers can’t compete with
fresh, tasty comfort food for ourselves and our families from a slow
cooker, ready when we drag ourselves in from the day.
Best of all, we don’t have to skimp. To cook a healthy meal, we
don’t have to resort to an endless string of recipes for boneless
skinless chicken breasts. Because of the way the slow cooker traps
every speck of goodness inside a stew or a braise, we can use more
flavorful cuts like beef chuck or chicken thighs and still end up with
a dinner that won’t pack on the pounds. In fact, a slow cooker may
well preserve more essential vitamins and minerals in foods
because of its lower-heat cooking method, even over a longer period
of time. The oven’s blast furnace can quickly destroy many of these
more delicate compounds that will indeed survive for hours at a
lower temperature. If you eat (or drink!) the broth or sauce created
with a dish in the cooker, you have an even better shot at consuming
more of the essential nutrients your good ingredients have brought
to the table.
But let’s not just consider dinner. A slow cooker is the perfect tool
for making a savory breakfast porridge, a weekend egg casserole, a
pretty fine quinoa pilaf, and even an old-fashioned French dessert, a
rich and delicious clafouti. In other words, this is a tool that can
work for us all day long.
But not without a couple of caveats. Slow cookers have tight-
fitting heavy lids for a reason: to hold the heat constant and the
moisture intense. Avoid lifting that lid except when truly necessary.
Don’t put frozen or even partially frozen ingredients in a slow
cooker. They’ll impede the machine’s ability to get up to a safe
temperature quickly and can then aid in the production of some bad
bugs and subsequent upset stomachs. Meat may need up to 2 days
in the fridge on a plate to thaw properly; frozen mixed vegetables,
perhaps two hours at room temperature. Even fuss-free meals
require a little preplanning. But once that’s done, you can create
some pretty healthy meals in your slow cooker.
These recipes have been formatted to match those in our big book,
The Great American Slow Cooker Book. Each is charted out to
accommodate ingredients for almost every size of slow cooker made
today. If you’ve got a small 3-quart model for the two of you, we’ve
got you covered. And if you’ve got a vat for hordes, we’re on it, too.
Just look down the chart to discover the ingredient quantities fit for
your machine.
As in the larger book, we’ve used premade and processed products
only if they’re no different from those we’d make from scratch: for
example, canned broth or canned diced tomatoes. But no fat-free
Italian dressing with xanthan this and monosodium that. We also
insist on big tastes: slow cookers have a tendency to mute some
flavors in the overall mix, so we’ve pumped up the ingredients to
make sure the dishes have a nice pop when they’re done eight or so
hours later.
Modern slow cookers have a keep-warm setting; we’ve given you
indications for how long we think the dish can stay at that much
lower temperature and still be a success. But because modern slow
cookers heat to a slightly higher temperature than earlier models, we
can’t be loosey-goosey with the timings. There are no 7-to-10 hours
ranges here, as in some older recipes. No, you don’t have to rush
home to dinner; the keep-warm setting prevents that. But you do
have to be a little more exacting in your cooking—which only means
that the dish will have a better chance at success. And that’s no
mean trade-off.
So let’s get started with breakfast and go all the way through
dessert, creating healthy and tasty meals from America’s favorite
appliance. Your friends and family certainly deserve it. But mostly
you deserve it.
breakfast
quinoa and millet porridge with dried
apricots EFFORT: NOT MUCH PREP TIME:
10 MINUTES COOK TIME: 7 HOURS KEEPS
ON WARM: 1 HOUR SERVES: 4 TO 8
2-to 3½-QUART
5 cups water ¾ cup chopped dried apricots ½ cup plus 2 tblsp red or white
quinoa, rinsed well in a fine-mesh sieve or lined colander ½ cup millet ¼
cup sugar 1 tsp finely grated orange zest ¼ tsp salt
4-to 5½-QUART
7½ cups water 1 cup plus 2 tblsp chopped dried apricots 1 cup red or white
quinoa, rinsed well in a fine-mesh sieve or lined colander ¾ cup millet 6
tblsp sugar 1½ tsp finely grated orange zest ¼ tsp salt
6-to 8-QUART
10 cups water 1½ cups chopped dried apricots 1¼ cups red or white quinoa,
rinsed well in a fine-mesh sieve or lined colander 1 cup millet ½ cup sugar
2 tsp finely grated orange zest ½ tsp salt
Stir all the ingredients in a slow cooker until the sugar has
dissolved. Cover and cook on low for 7 hours, or until the quinoa
and millet are tender and the porridge has thickened considerably.
TESTERS’ NOTES
• Thanks to the millet, this porridge is another somewhat savory breakfast despite the
sugar.
• Millet is the smallest grain available in the modern supermarket: tiny little yellow
specks that can turn into a pain in the neck if you spill the bag in your kitchen. Unless