Sites We Love: We Love A Year of Slow Cooking for Easy, Delicious Recipes

If you thought slow-cookers went out of style alongside avocado-colored appliances and shag carpets, you weren?t entirely wrong. But as busy schedules push aside home-cooked meals and healthy dinners, the Crock-Pot is a foolproof?and eco-friendly?solution to the fast-food-every-night problem: it uses minimal energy, which is good for your wallet and your carbon footprint; it makes a ton of food, so you always have leftovers; you can use less expensive cuts of meat; and you can throw in meat and vegetables raw (or even frozen) before heading off to work and come home to a mouth-watering meal.

That's why we love A Year of Slow Cooking, where chef/writer Stephanie O?Dea resolved to use her Crock-Pot every day in 2008. The result is an indispensable collection of gluten-free (but still scrumptious) recipes?some she developed, some sent in by readers?from pasta, pork, and chicken dishes to breakfast casseroles, desserts, and soups. O?Dea walks readers through the inspiration, ingredients, the process, and the results with snappy writing and candid details of her family?s reactions?like when she serves up black bean soup on Day 42, and writes that her daughter "?fell to the ground and said she would never eat anything that looked like dirt?I need to find a way to make a pink soup."

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