It is a good thing that I have always loved to cook. With three kids to feed, one of whom grew to be 6'8", I have done a lot of meals over the years! Learning how to cook healthy meals has been an evolution. Access to better cooking advice and recipes has gotten easier and easier. Sharing what I have learned is a passion and delight for me.
Our daughter lives at home with us. She is contributing more and more to helping with the household duties. One of those is fixing meals, particularly dinners. With her schedule she often doesn't get home until mid-evening so it has been hard to figure out how to have her help with meals. Then we realized we have a crock pot! One pot meals are actually a great way for young adults to learn how to cook. Recipes are easy to assemble and easy to clean up! The main thing it to find recipes with out too many ingredients or too much chopping.
To start off, I handed my daughter a few cookbooks with slow cooker recipes. I asked her to mark ones she thought looked appealing and interesting enough for her to want to make. This turned out to be a fun thing for her to do. We now have lots of pages marked with recipes she has chosen as possible meals.
The three resources I gave her are:
Skinny Slow Cooker, a Better Homes and Gardens Special Interest Publication, I got at the grocery store...looks like a magazine
Cooking Light Slow Cooker, published in 2006 by Oxmoor House
Betty Crocker 4 Ingredient Dinners, published in 2003 by Wiley Publishing (given to my daughter by her brothers a few Christmases ago)
The first three recipes she will be preparing this next week are:
Caribbean Seafood Pot, p100 from Cooking Light Slow Cooker
Beef and Bean Chili, p24 from Cooking Light Slow Cooker
Spiced Pork with Squash and Potatoes, p66 from Skinny Slow Cooker
She actually fixed the Caribbean Seafood Pot last night. It was really tasty!
All the recipes fit into our overall plan of making meals that are 500 calories or less. They also fit into the overall menu planning for the week. This means the recipes picked for any given week will support having two vegetarian dinners, two seafood dinners and only one beef dinner with the rest being pork, turkey or chicken.
As you can see by the happy smile on my daughters face in the photo, I think our new plan is already working!
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