Book Review: The Healthy Family Slow Cooker Cookbook

I have two slow cookers (two different sizes) and I use them often. I had a baby in January and the flexibility of the slow cooker makes it a lot easier to have a home-cooked meal every night. But lately I’ve felt like I’m cooking the same old things over and over again, so I was excited to be part of this blog tour–I hoped I could find a few more recipes to rotate in.

With most cook books, I’m interested in about 10% of the recipes. But The Healthy Family Slow Cooker Cookbook is a great fit for my family. I’m interested in trying out about 70% of the recipes. Here are some of the reasons I like this cookbook:

• The book has lots of pictures.
• It got my entire family involved (well, almost). My five-year-old twins have picked out recipes they want to try and so has my husband. I imagine the baby would have drooled over the cookbook (literally), but he’s still on a milk-and-rice-cereal diet, so I haven’t let him touch it.
• The recipes are easy.
• The ingredient lists include things I normally buy. There are very few processed foods on the ingredient lists, just basic meats, vegetables, and spices. OK, you have to buy tortillas and I supposed those are processed, but you get the point. I feel like the things going into the slow cooker are healthy building blocks.
• I don’t think wine made it onto any of the ingredient lists. I know wine cooks out, but recently I bought a crockpot app with 500 recipes and it seemed like they all had wine on the ingredient list. I don’t really want to buy cooking wine for something I might make once.
• The recipes seem flexible. Our family doesn’t like raw onions very much, so we used tomatoes instead of onion when we tried out the chicken gyros. The kids didn’t like artichokes in the Chicken Artichoke Fettuccine, so we’ll try broccoli instead next time. One of the recipes called for whole chicken, but we used chicken tenderloins instead and it turned out fine.
• We’ve tried out three of the recipes (Chicken and Asparagus, Chicken Gyros, and Chicken Artichoke Fettuccine) and enjoyed each of them enough to cook them again. I’m excited to try more!

Every family has slightly different eating habits, but if you enjoy using a slow cooker and want healthy meals, I recommend this one. If for some reason I had to get rid of all my cookbooks except one, this would be the one I kept.

Here’s more about the author:

Christina Dymock is a graduate of the University of Utah. She has had careers as an editor at an advertising agency, an adjunct instructor at Salt Lake Community College, and author.

An avid cook, Christina divides her time between the kitchen, her computer, books, and her family of six. (Naturally, the family gets the biggest share.) Because she reads everything, she also feels compelled to write in several genres. Her latest fiction book, Blue Christmas, published under her pen name, Lucy McConnell, reached the Amazon top seller list in 7 categories as part of the Christmas anthology, Christmas in Snow Valley.

Christina attends multiple writer’s conferences each year, is a part of several critique groups, and enjoys learning about writing. She has been featured during the cooking segment of several local morning shows, published in Woman’s World Magazine and the Deseret News, quoted in Womans’ World Magazine and Parents’ Magazine, published in seven Chicken Soup books.

  The Healthy Family Slow Cooker Cookbook is available on Amazon.

*I received a complimentary copy of this cookbook in exchange for my honest review.