Five EASY and Delicious Slow Cooker Recipes!

hello friend welcome back to acre Homesite I've got a very very busy day today of food preservation so what I need is a very easy dinner and today we are going to be making a crock pot dinner there needs to be one thing to be done in order to make this dinner and that is to brown one pound of hamburger while that is Browning on the stove I'm gonna get going on some of the veggies that we need for the soup we are going to be making five crock pot dinners I don't use my crock pot very much and I was so inspired by the five instant pot dinners we did I thought let's try the same thing with the crock pot so I have all my recipes planned out and the first one because I'm going to be in the kitchen all day today I thought a nice soup would be good because it's a little bit cooler out there today if you can believe it or not and I've got to be doing a ton of food preservation this one basket is just what I harvested this morning and so this is just some of the abundance that we are going to be working with today and tis the season of food preservation season so I need recipes that are going to be easy fast and really delicious so the first thing we need to do is shred up three quarters of a cup of carrots I'll link all these recipes down below I went out into the garden this morning and I picked some carrots to see how the carrots out in the garden are doing and they are not quite ready to be harvested yet so I just have some store-bought carrots here but I do have some homegrown celery that I was able to harvest this morning foreign think I mentioned what we're making for dinner tonight we are making a potato creamy hamburger soup and all the recipes that I'm making this week are brand new to me and I will link them all down below and I'm excited just to see how well we like using the crock pot the way I usually use my crock pot is I make roast in it and I make broth in it and that's about it so we're gonna kind of just get out of our comfort zone and see if we like using the crock pot I typically use my stove in my oven more but I had so much fun with the instant Pot recipes I thought let's see if we can get inspired and try some new things in the crock pot so tonight we're making soup tomorrow we're going to make a Cajun alfredo pasta we make Mongolian beef we also make a taco bake and then we make peach cobbler in the crock pot so this is going to be a fun week I hope you enjoy hanging out with me as we make these brand new recipes cooked through I'm just taking a paper towel and using it to kind of soak up any of the excess grease this is grass-fed beef from a local farmer so it's not super greasy but I don't want any extra in my soup so I'm going to go ahead and toss this and now we can assemble our soup so to the crock pot I'm going to add our ground beef [Music] our carrot celery garlic I already had some pre-diced onion in the fridge so I'm going to add onion I didn't even have to dice that today three cups of chicken broth [Applause] and potatoes these are potatoes that I grew last year and I canned up and I'm going to get those in there as well the recipe calls for fresh potatoes diced and peeled but I don't have any of those the ones in the garden are still growing and I have these so I want to use these up so I'm going to mix everything together and then we're going to get the lid on it and it already smells really really good you can cook this recipe on low or high I'm going to cook it on low today because I'm just going to be in the kitchen all day so now dinner is almost completely done it has a few more ingredients we're going to add but we're going to add those toward the end so for now I'm just going to let it sit and cook for a good about six hours I just finished up a huge food preservation day and now we're gonna put the finishing touches on this soup I'm really excited to have this I've been smelling it all day and it smells so yummy so what we need to do is make a roux we're gonna make like a white sauce to kind of thicken the soup a little bit a lot of crock pot recipes call for cream of chicken or cream of soups and we're basically making a homemade version of that so instead of opening a can we're gonna whip this up together really quickly so I'm going to melt some butter and some flour together and then we're going to mix in some milk but I need to let this cook together first I'm going to move my reserves to the side so we're going to let the butter melt and the flour cook so our sauce is thickened up a ton so now we're gonna add two ounces of cream cheese and we're gonna have that melt in there you can see how thick this is this is just like a can of cream of cream of soup it's just homemade and some of the other recipes I'll be showing you how to make cream of chicken and a cream of well I don't think we're gonna do a cream of mushroom but I do have a recipe on that so we're basically making a cream of cheese soup here so I just added some cheddar cheese so I'm going to mix that in the stove is off and I'm just going to have all of this melt and come together soup is looking like after cooking for many hours it smells so rich and beautiful the potatoes are tender the veggies are tender so now we're going to add our cream of cheese into this you can see how nice and creamy this is now the original recipe that I'm basing this recipe off called for Velveeta cheese well I don't have that and I never have that in my house so I just substituted a mild ish cheddar cheese one that's gonna have a good melting point so now we're going to add this to our soup foreign we're going to let this cook for about another 30 minutes or so to go with tonight's dinner I have some zucchini cheddar biscuits from the freezer and I'm going to bake these up to go with dinner I just took the zucchini cheddar biscuits out of the oven and they smell and look incredible so now we can dish up our soup and give it a try you can see if we need to adjust any of the seasonings I think this would be really good with a little bit of green onion on the top I don't have any right now so we're just gonna go like this it looks incredible it smells so rich and delicious this will be so yummy with the biscuit dipped into it now I know that probably didn't need cheddar biscuits with soup that has cheese in it but those are the biscuits I had in the freezer and I wanted something easy to go along with dinner let's give this a try you can see if we need to add any more Pepper or salt I think a little bit of fresh black pepper on the top of this would be really good it's really good really rich creamy comforting I don't make soup with ground beef in it very often that's really good it's a really unique take on this soup this would be really good too vegetarian without the ground beef even though this is hamburger soup if it was just a cheesy potato and you made it exactly the same except leave out the beef and maybe throw in some really diced up broccoli this would be really good too that how that's how you could make it into a vegetarian version of this it's very hot I'm gonna call Josh in for dinner we're gonna enjoy this for dinner and I will see you next time I make dinner in the crock pot good morning we are at it again we are gonna make Cajun Alfredo in the crock pot and the cool thing about this recipe is you cook the pasta in the crock pot I've never done this before and I'm really excited to give it a try and see how it goes so we need to Brown our chicken first and our sausage the recipe calls for cooked Cajun sausage I don't have that mine is still raw so I want to Brown this before I put it in the crock pot and then I have two chicken breasts here so what I'm going to do is while this pan is heating up I'm going to salt each side of the chicken breast and I'm going to put some pepper on it too and then once I put it in here I'll put it seasoned side down and then I can season the oven I think this is the key when making crock pot recipes is because I don't have a lot of experience is Browning the meat first so that you get that taste of the browned meat instead of it just kind of steaming in crock pot since we're making Cajun pasta I'm going to add a little bit of Cajun seasoning to this chicken on this side as well we don't have to fully cook this chicken because we're going to cook it in the crock pot we're just looking to get a nice brown color on it I think I need a little bit more oil on the chicken before I flip it you all have seen me do this before but I think this is a really important step so I don't want to skip it the recipe originally does not say to do this but I am going to take some of the broth that the recipe calls for and I'm going to deglaze the pan I need to use this pan to Brown my sausage and if I was to put my sausage into that pan with those brown bits those brown bits were going to burn before my sausage could get browned and I didn't want to waste those brown bits because that's flavor so I just took some of the broth and deglazed the pan with it and then I poured that into the crock pot so we won kind of cleaned the the pan so that I could Brown the sausage into we are keeping that flavor in our dinner tonight so I'm going to cook both sides of this sausage until it's nice and browned it does not have to be fully cooked because again we are going to put it in the crock pot and we are going to fully cook it in the crock pot and then I'm going to go ahead and deglaze the pan again I will get that broth into the crock pot and we will continue to finish this recipe this recipe is really really good and one of the favorites that I made during this week now that we have our meat cooked we need to add the rest of the ingredients we're going to add two tablespoons of cajun spice and then we're going to add the remaining of the chicken broth this is why I wanted to Brown everything so it would have that nice Brown texture and not just cooked in the broth we're going to add garlic those are our pre-chopped garlic and heavy cream now we can put the lid on and we're going to cook this on high for two to three hours or you can cook it on low for four hours I want to get dinner on the table so I'm going to go ahead and cook this on high we're going to set this aside I've got a bunch of food preservation projects again I need to do tis the season there's some stuff right there I need to go out to the garden and harvest a bunch of things so our dinner is cooking for me while I'm doing other things I almost forgot the butter what would Alfredo be without butter this is smelling Divine but what I need to do now is take the internal temperature of our chicken and it's at 169 which is perfect that's what we want so what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut this chicken into pieces the nice thing is we didn't completely cook it to where the chicken is just gonna turn into just complete shreds I like when the chicken has a little bit more texture to it but it's still going to be really tender because it still has time to cook so I'm going to stick the chicken I'm Gonna Leave the sausage in and then we're going to add one box of rigatolli [Applause] and we're supposed to add a half a cup of water to this I'm going to wait on the water and if I feel like it needs a little bit more liquid then I'll add the liquid now we're going to cut our chicken into bite-sized pieces I really like that it has some texture to it I'm happy about this it tastes incredible I did just take a taste of it now we're going to put this back into the crock pot now we're going to put the lid on and let it cook for at least 30 minutes I want to check on this pasta to see if I need to add that half a cup of water but I also need to add our parmesan cheese and I'm going to stir this in and see how the noodles are doing you know I don't think we need to add any liquid can you see that there's definitely still liquid in there so I'm glad I did not add that half a cup of water we're going to add the cheese we're gonna let the cheese melt and thicken up this sauce a little bit the noodles feel like they are almost done I think pasta is done oh yeah that's perfect the cheese thickened up that sauce beautifully the pasta is nice and tender so let's dish this up give it a taste test tell me are you a little Fork person or a big fork person Josh and I are not on the same page when it comes to what size Forks we like so tell me what you think I'm team little I know I'm team Big Fork little spoon and Josh is the opposite he's team Little Fork big spoon so it works out perfect for us that is so delicious is so good I could not wait for Josh to try it I was worried it was going to be a little bit spicy because the Cajun but I think it's I don't think it needs any more cheese either I think the amount of cheese that I put on it to begin with is perfect here's tonight's dinner Cajun alfredo pasta in the crock pot with our cucumber salad I'm gonna dish that up for us and that is going to be delicious friend it is the next week and it is another crock pot recipe it's another day of food preservation thus I'm pulling out the crock pot to make Korean beef in the crock pot I thawed a chuck roast yesterday and this morning I went ahead and I took off the bones and I cut off any really big pieces of fat off this chuck roast so that it would be easier to shred when this recipe is done now I am cutting it into bite-sized pieces and I'm getting it into the crock pot and this is going to be probably the easiest recipe we have made so far because it's a kind of dump and go recipe the next recipe we're going to be making tomorrow or whenever I get to making a crock pot recipe is going to be a Mexican bean and rice recipe so I'm actually going to do it surprisingly some of the prep today for for tomorrow's recipe now that we have our chuck roast pieces in our crock pot we're gonna make the sauce I chose chuck roast because when chuck roast slow Cooks it falls apart and it becomes so tender and delicious so that is in here and my chuck roast was a little bit smaller than this recipe calls for so I'm actually going to be cutting the sauce in half I will link this recipe down below we're going to start with some broth and I don't have any small jars of beef broth I only have quartz so I'm gonna make some with this home freeze-dried broth powder so if you have a can of beef broth or some bouillon powder go ahead and use that this just happens to be some homemade so just like that we have some homemade broth reconstituted now I'm going to add brown sugar soy sauce onion powder this is home freeze-dried onion powder go to garu which is a Korean red pepper flake and I am out of rice wine vinegar but I have some of this homemade chai vinegar so I'm going to use that instead we're going to mix this together so the first thing I'm going to do is just salt and pepper the beef a little bit now we're going to pour our sauce over the beef now I'm going to put the lid on and we're going to cook this on low for six to eight hours until this meat is fall apart tender I basically have dinner going you only need to do a few more things and dinner is going to be done well I'm in the kitchen doing a bunch of food preservation projects see you back in eight hours I almost forgot garlic so I just threw a chunk of frozen garlic in there as soon as that thaws I'll just stir it in another reason I'm grateful for a crock pot recipe today is it's supposed to be a hundred and five degrees today so I didn't want to do any other cooking on the stove or anything like that heating my house up the food preservation projects that I'm going to be getting to will do that enough now that dinner is almost ready it's been smelling delicious cooking away this was another one of our favorites it was so good I thought that it's almost done so let's get some rice cooked and I'm gonna go ahead and get cooked in the instant pot now I need rice pre-cooked rice for the next recipe we're gonna make so this worked out perfect I could prep it for dinner tonight and then I could also prep it for the next dinner we're gonna be making so I've got three cups of rice I'm gonna add the water to the instant pot and all I'm gonna do is push the rice button on the instant pot and it Cooks rice beautifully every time kitchen today so I actually took this crock pot and I put it in my pantry because it's got a club and this is perfect so this recipe that I found online said you can make a cornstarch slurry to thicken the sauce this sauce looks thick enough to me let me pull you in and show you what this looks like it is fall apart tender because I took time to cut away most of the fat you can see how just tender and beautiful it is there isn't much fat on this so this is perfect this sauce is nice and thick so I ran up to the garden and I grabbed some green onions and some fresh cilantro to top our dinner with I'm just going to run a knife through this and do a nice rough chop this is probably one of our new favorite recipes it was so good and so easy this would be good any time of year it just it was a dump it was a what I think of a true easy crock pot meal just dump and go and this took less than 10 minutes to put together it's not quite dinner time but I want to give this a taste test to see if I need to adjust any of the seasonings let's see what it tastes like perfect absolute winner I'm not gonna do anything to it I'm gonna put the lid on I'm gonna put it on keep warm and next time we're in the kitchen we need to use some of leftover rice I needed to make extra today so that next time we make a crock pot meal we are going to make a chicken Mexican bake and then I wanted to mention the Cajun Alfredo Josh loved it it was so delicious I would even do it next time with just chicken and do the Cajun seasoning and all that it was perfect I like how I cooked the chicken it wasn't overcooked it wasn't completely shredded to nothing it had a perfect texture and it was just really delicious so I will see you next time we're in the kitchen making the Mexican bake good morning we are back at it another crock pot recipe this is Southwest crock pot chicken and rice the recipe that I found for this calls for chicken breast I have thawed chicken thighs out so we're gonna put three chicken thighs at the bottom of our crock pot and I'm going to adapt this recipe a little bit because I have so many Garden Fresh Produce that's coming out of the garden right now this recipe calls for a lot of canned items and since I have fresh I'm just gonna go ahead and use fresh so the first thing we need to do is put this meat in the crock pot at the bottom so I have that in here I went ahead and turned on the crock pot so that it can just start getting warm while we chop these vegetables so I have one onion it's kind of a small onion from the garden but it will work for what we need and then it calls for one can of diced tomatoes I already pre-washed all these veggies I'm going to go ahead and get these tomatoes from the garden chopped up and we'll use these in place of a can of diced tomatoes and it also calls for a can of chilies well I have some poblano peppers from the garden so I'm going to use those instead so we're using this recipe as a kind of just a guide foreign that actually looks like it's probably about one can of tomatoes so I'm gonna not put these ones in we are also going to need some black beans I have some homegrown home canned black beans here I'm gonna get these opened and drained and rinsed to go into the crock pot I'm gonna go ahead and season up our chicken just a little bit I also did cut off any excess fat from these chicken thighs just so that we wouldn't bite into that and now we need to add our peppers and we're just going to layer this all all the veggies on top of the chicken onions the tomatoes I have a bag of frozen corn I'm gonna put about two handfuls in there on top it said one can but I don't have canned corn so I'm just using Frozen now we're gonna sprinkle our beans on the top of that I'm going to cover the lid for just a minute while we make while we make our cream of chicken soup this recipe calls for a can of cream of chicken soup I don't have a can but I have a recipe to make it and it's so easy and delicious so we're just gonna make it from homemade those are all the tomatoes I just harvested this morning so it's going to be a busy day today working on getting that stuff preserved up so an easy crock pot meal sounds like a win to me so we're gonna get the oven or the stove going I just have a little pot here I've got about six tablespoons of butter we're gonna put that in our pot along with six tablespoons of flour we're gonna let the butter and the flour melt and cook for a minute together now that our butter and flour are cooked together I pre-measured out one cup of chicken broth and one cup of milk and we're gonna cook this together until it thickens while this is thickening I'm going to add this rest of the seasonings we've got garlic powder cumin smoked paprika a little bit of coriander and some onion powder I'm also going to add some salt and you can see how this is starting to thicken up a little bit I'm going to let it thicken a little more and then it's done I do want to give this a taste test before we put it on our chicken so the way the recipe was originally written was you take a can of cream of chicken soup you dump that into a bowl you add some milk and you add your seasonings to it so I just added everything in the pot oh that's delicious that is really good so now that our sauce is nice and thick you can see how thick it is we're gonna pour it over our chicken and our veggies if you've never made a homemade cream of chicken this is kind of a Southwest style cream of chicken because we added all those yummy flavors to it but if you've never made that before cream of chicken it's really really easy it's just simple ingredients I like to make it because I make my own homemade broth and so it's a lot more cost effective to make it because I have all the ingredients on hand and I can control the ingredients but if you don't want to make it homemade don't worry about that just go get yourself a can of cream of chicken soup and follow the recipe that is written so I'm gonna put this on the top and now dinner is basically done there's a few more ingredients we're going to do to this now this is a recipe I've never tried before so I'm excited to see how it goes I'm gonna put it on high and it says that it should cook on high for three to four hours or on low for six to eight hours so I'm excited to see if we like this we are going to still add some rice and some cheese at the end and then we'll see I'm excited to give this a try you can see all that stuff in the background that is all the projects that I have in store for me so I have my work cut out for me today so I'm glad to have uh that probably took less than 10 minutes to put together longest part was chopping the vegetables so I'm excited about that we'll see you back in a few hours I checked the chicken's temperature and it is done it's 165. it smells really good so what I need to do now is take the chicken and kind of pull it apart and I'm going to break it up and kind of shred it and the recipe says to pull the chicken all the way out but I don't want to get another thing dirty so I'm just going to do it right in here because it's so tender it's just falling apart it's kind of soupy now but we do have a couple more ingredients to add now that the chicken is kind of bite-sized we're going to add the rest of the ingredients I have three cups of pre-cooked rice I cook this rice when I made the last recipe I knew I wanted to make this one so I went ahead and made a little bit extra so we could put this in here and then I'm also going to add one cup of cheddar cheese and we're gonna mix that in I want to make sure that cheddar cheese gets mixed in well now we're going to add the rest of the cheddar cheese on top now we're going to put the lid on we're going to let the rice warm through and the cheese melt and that is dinner so I'm excited to give this a try it's a little bit soupier than I was expecting so I'm hoping that the rice will kind of absorb some of that moisture and I think I'm gonna go downstairs and open a bag of chips and grab a bag of chips so we could eat this maybe with some chips or something smells really good it's been about an hour since we mixed the rice in and the cheese on top so I thought it would be good to give it a try I was thinking earlier I should have probably tried this before I put the cheese on top and the lid on top and to see if it needed any salt or pepper because we used homemade cream of chicken it doesn't have as much salt in it so I didn't really think about that but this is actually thickened up more than I thought it would have it smells really good it's still a little bit on the thin side but it does definitely thickened up quite a bit so let's give this a taste test it's basically like rice and beans like our burrito bowl kind of just all in one all-in-one crock pot that's really good I do think it could use a little bit more salt but that's my fault for not seasoning or tasting it when before I put the cheese in so I'll just let Josh know that you know the way we're gonna eat it actually is with some chips so to serve along with this I pulled out a bag of chips and we've got some pickled onions that we can top it with we've got a little bit of hot sauce some sour cream and some cilantro from the garden the next recipe we are going to be making in the crock pot is actually a dessert we're going to be making peach cobbler and I'm really looking forward to it I've got the peaches I've got the butter let's make peach cobbler I'm really excited to try this recipe because I've always wanted to try making dessert in a crock pot before I've never done it and so this is going to be fun so I have a half a cup of butter that I melted I'm supposed to put that at the bottom of the crock pot and now we need to bake our batter batter should come together really really quickly we need one cup of milk a cup of flour a half a cup of sugar two teaspoons of baking powder this is a half teaspoon so I'm gonna add four of these I'm going to kind of mix that in with the flour just a little bit cinnamon and salt now this recipe calls for one cup of sugar I'm reducing the sugar down just a little bit because I'm going to serve this over vanilla ice cream and it does not call for salt but I always put salt in my desserts because I think it helps balance the flavor now we're supposed to pour this batter over top of the butter now I have some home canned peaches I canned these in 2021 this is a great way to use them up and I'm going to strain off some of the juice I'm just going to set these in our batter it was that easy to put this together so I hope this turns out because if it does how nice is it to have this easy dessert in our Arsenal so now what it said to do is cover the crock pot with a paper towel or a cloth to help absorb the condensation so that your cobbler can set properly and I put it on high and we're going to let it sit on high for anywhere from for an hour and a half to two hours it said just let cook until set I have some vanilla ice cream in my freezer and so I will see you back when this is done this smells incredible but it did take about three hours to cook so it took quite a bit longer I could not in the hour and a half or two hours that the recipe said it I couldn't get the center to set because another thing it said is that the cobbler had to be set and I'm really curious to know if this is going to be any good or not I'm hoping that it didn't burn around the outside because it took so much longer to get the center cooked that I'm worried that the outside the sugars might have got too caramelized so let's dig into this and see how well we did it looks kind of interesting oh it's caramelized on the bottom it almost smells like it's brown sugar I think because of the caramelization that we got on it oh yeah that looks great it's not burnt I think any longer and it would be a little bit questionable but I think that this is fine so that's what it's looking like so let's give this a try and see how it is growing up my mom always made crisps she never made cobbler because that's what she prefers and I don't think I ever actually had a cobbler until I was an adult and I think I actually like cobbler better but this is not at all how I normally make it normally it's almost like a biscuit that you put on the top when I make peach cobbler and this is kind of more like a dumpling it's it's more like it's steamed in the crock pot versus in the oven except the outside let me show you where right there that's not burnt it looks darker for you guys than it does for me but that's just caramelized from the crock pot any longer though and that was on the verge of being burnt this is so hot but I wanted to get a little bit of ice cream a little bit of Peach and a little bit of our dumpling smells so good I'm just waiting for it to cool down I have so many canned peaches downstairs that I could make this whenever I want to but I could also make it in the oven too this is just kind of a fun experiment I just tasted the biscuit part really good that's really good that's really good I am so glad that I cut the sweetness in half the recipe called for one whole cup of sugar that would have been way too sweet the half a cup of sugar is plenty sweet this is really good the peach is really hot mmm okay I need to set this down that is delicious I think I prefer it in the oven as opposed to just the texture overall I I kind of do like the doughy texture but I think I like it in the oven better could just be this recipe too I don't know this was it's really good we will enjoy this it'll be make a really good breakfast I've got some bacon in the refrigerator or on the refrigerator in the freezer that's already pre-cooked I think I'm gonna warm that up we can have this for breakfast tomorrow and that's going to be fantastic friend thank you so much for joining me for these four dinner crock pot recipes and this one dessert recipe I am not a crock pot expert user these were all brand new recipes to me and I don't use my crock pot very much so this is kind of fun to kind of test out the waters and try some different techniques and see how I like it I think in general I still prefer using my stove or my oven as opposed to the crock pot but it doesn't hurt to kind of stretch my different you know culinary techniques for different scenarios just depending on what's happening in life I think one of my favorite things that I did in the crock pot was that Mongolian beef just cooking beef slow in the crock pot just I know that it does that really well that's one thing the crock pot does do well and so it's been a great week so thanks for being here if you enjoyed this and you want to watch five instant Pot recipes I can put that video right here and if you want to watch some garden stuff because I've been talking about all these Garden things I've been doing I'll put a garden video right here for you so thank you for being here thank you for being you and I can't wait to see you next time bye friend

Channel: Acre Homestead

Views: 383,718

Keywords: Crock pot dinner, crock pot recipe, easy recipe, dump and go recipe, dump and go, crock pot, slow cooker, slow cooker recipe, dinner recipe, cooking dinner, easy dinner, fast dinner, slow cooker dinner, crock pot dinner, 15 minute dinner

Id: 5gXWpdaGtJE

Length: 41min 6sec (2466 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 30 2023