Busy People's Slow Cooker Cookbook

Busy People’s

Slow-Cooker

Cookbook

Dawn Hall

To one of my most favorite people in the world, my mother, Wendy Ellen Oberhouse, whose mouthwatering meals on more than one occasion distracted me from the Sunday church service.

Copyright © 2003 by Dawn Hall

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Published by Rutledge Hill Press, a Division of Thomas Nelson, Inc., P.O. Box 141000, Nashville, Tennessee, 37214.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hall, Dawn.

Busy people’s slow-cooker cookbook / by Dawn Hall.

      p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 1-4016-0107-3 (hidden spiral)

1. Electric cookery, Slow. 2. Quick and easy cookery. I. Title.

TX827.H35 2003

641.5'884—dc21

      2003001765

Printed in Hong Kong

03 04 05 06 07—5 4 3 2 1

Complete Your

Busy People’s Library

The recipes in these two cookbooks are all easy to prepare and cook They all contain 7 ingredients or less and can be prepared in less than 30 minutes

Down-Home Cooking Without the Down-Home Fat

1-4016-0104-9

$16.99

Includes recipes for:

• Citrus Pancakes

• Caesar Oyster Crackers

• Chicken Skillet Cobbler

• Chewy, Gooey No-Bake Freezer Cookies

• Turtle Cake

Busy People’s Low-Fat Cookbook

1-4016-0107-3

$16.99

Includes recipes for:

• Eight-layer Chili Casserole

• Steak and Potato Cattleman’s Soup

• Cherry Oatmeal

• Peppermint Chocolate Cheesecake

• Butterfinger Trifle

Available at better book stores everywhere!

or at

www.RutledgeHillPress.com

Reviews from Real-Life Busy People

I wasn’t expecting this to be such a great book. It is so full of great recipes! Usually you buy a recipe book and maybe try one or two but not with this book. This is a keeper. All the recipes are simple with only a few ingredients and almost no prep time. This was exactly what I needed to keep dinners sane in a very busy household with people eating at all different times.

I am a very busy mom and Dawn Hall’s cookbooks have been a lifesaver for me. My family has loved everything I have fixed in the Busy People’s Slow Cooker Cookbook. I can look up a recipe at the last minute and have all the ingredients 95% of the time. This is rare for me with other cookbooks.

As a working mother of two boys, this cookbook is a lifesaver! It is one of the better slow cooker cookbooks I’ve seen. The recipes are different than other ones I have seen, and they are all 7 ingredients or less. Gotta love that! It really does make life a lot easier. It is so nice to come home and have dinner ready and have it taste good. My husband and kids are always happy.

This cookbook has some of the best crock-pot recipes I’ve seen. Dawn Hall has outdone herself this time with a variety of delicious, easy to prepare dishes that all use 7 ingredients or less. You’ll spend more time deciding which recipe to try first than actually making the meal!

Contents

Acknowledgments

My Story

Introduction

Breakfast

Appetizers

Breads

Soups & Salads

Side Dishes

Entrées

Desserts

Index

Acknowledgments

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

I am so blessed. God has surrounded me with a wonderful support team of people of integrity, character, and a high work ethic. Each of them is a vital part of this book’s success.

It seems appropriate, since I thank God daily for these two very special people, that I first publicly acknowledge what a tremendous gift from God they both are to me. To my faithful, loyal, hardworking, and dedicated assistants, Karen Schwanbeck and Diane Bowman-Yantiss, I am and will always be grateful. You two are my right hand ladies. There’s no way I could do all I do without you.

To Brenda Crosser, my test-cooking assistant, thank you for all of your help and helpful suggestions. I appreciate you.

To Jo Anna Lund, the unselfish, ever-giving, and caring author of Healthy Exchanges Cookbooks, thank you for your counsel and for introducing me to your literary agent. More importantly, thank you for being a living example of a godly, Christian businesswoman and author who truly runs her business and life by the Golden Rule.

To my literary agent, Coleen O’Shea, thank you for all you do on my behalf and for bringing Rutledge Hill Press and me together. We are a great fit.

To the staff at Rutledge Hill Press, I am grateful to be united with publishers of integrity such as you. I am blessed to be able to say my publishers don’t publish anything I would be ashamed to be associated with. That means a lot to me.

Thank you, Tammi Hancock, a registered dietitian, for your expertise in getting accurate nutritional data for each recipe.

Last but not least, I want to thank my family. Often people think it would be wonderful to be at my dinner table every day eating something new or different I had created. But in all honesty, how would you like to be a guinea pig 365 days a year? They got tired of continually eating a meal prepared in the slow cooker—nonstop, day in and day out, until I finished this cookbook. For their patience and perseverance, I thank them.

My Story

It’s been said that sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. Often this has been the case in my life. If I were not the one living my life, I’d find the truth of my life unbelievable. Many have said my story would make a great movie. Who knows? Maybe someday.

I was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana. My parents divorced when I was five. When I was ten we moved to Toledo, Ohio, when my mom remarried. I’m the oldest of seven. I feel I was born watching my weight and have struggled with being a compulsive overeater for as long as I can remember. I hate it.

I flunked first grade. In the early years of elementary school my teachers always told me I wasn’t focusing in class, even though I was trying to with all my might. It wasn’t until adulthood that I was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, which explains my extreme difficulty (even today) concentrating with background noise and distractions. I graduated with honors in 1981 from Springfield High School.

I married my high school sweetheart, Tracy Wayne Hall, in 1984. I never went to college. I worked as a waitress until I was pregnant with our first child in 1986. We were blessed with two wonderful daughters born in 1987 and 1988. It took one year to physically build our small ranch home ourselves (with the help of friends) while our family lived in a tiny efficiency apartment above Tracy’s parents’ garage. We fondly named our new home Cozy Homestead, and we moved into it in June 1992.

I enjoyed teaching aerobics and facilitating classes for compulsive overeaters. With passion I was creating new recipes every day, and our family never ate the same meal twice for family dinners. I home-schooled our children until November 28, 1994. I’ll never forget that day. It was the day my life was turned inside out and upside down and also the last day of a normal life as I can remember it.

November 28, 1994, the day after my loving husband’s thirty-second birthday, was the day we found out Tracy had brain cancer. Doctors were able to surgically remove one pound of malignant tumor, leaving Tracy completely paralyzed on his entire left side. He was given six to eight months to live.

I told Tracy the day we found out about his cancer that I believed God was going to use our most challenging situation to give Himself praise and glory. That is exactly what God is doing to this day.

To make a long story short, in order to pay for an experimental treatment, we had to raise thousands of dollars each month because our insurance would not pay for experimental treatments. All of the recipes I had been creating over the previous five years I printed into books and sold in order to earn enough money for Tracy’s treatments. My thought was we could use what little we had left in our savings to pay for a couple weeks of Tracy’s treatment, or we could try to invest the money into cookbooks and hopefully earn enough to pay for his treatments indefinitely. In the beginning, when I was driving home with my first vanload of a thousand cookbooks I thought to myself, You’re nuts, Dawn. How in the world are you going to sell a thousand books? You’re nuts! Well, we sold a thousand cookbooks in five days and eighteen thousand cookbooks in ten weeks. That first book was Down Home Cookin’ without the Down Home Fat . It was selected as one of Ohio’s Best of the Best Cookbooks by Quail Ridge Press and the 1996 Best Cookbook of the Year by North American Book Dealers Exchange. Not too shabby for a homemaker who didn’t know how to type or use a computer, huh? I would be a fool if I thought for even one moment that I did it. Over 650,000 cookbooks sold. It was definitely a God thing, and He gets all the credit. He did it through me and for that I am forever grateful.

I guess we weren’t living with enough stress of daily financial bondage and fighting cancer and its devastating effects. We had a house fire on Valentine’s Day in 2000. It was a nightmare, and I did all I could to fight the fire. I remember vividly our daughters screaming in panic and fear, Get out of the house, Mom! It is only a house! They were scared to death. All I knew was I didn’t want our daughters to lose the house their daddy built for them. After all, how many little girls can say their daddy built their house for them? The fire left all four of us living in an assisted living nursing home for four months as builders restored our home back to its original state.

The good news was that Tracy lived for six and a half years after his diagnosis, twelve times longer than the doctors ever imagined. He was a wonderful father and an amazing example of a truly godly man. He inspired countless people, me included. He was able to fulfill his dream of living to see his little girls become young ladies. Tracy died on May 5, 2001. Ironically, it wasn’t the cancer that took him. It was from a fall that caused a brain hemorrhage. The experimental treatment had cured him completely. Tracy’s death was not in vain. The data gathered during his use of the experimental cancer treatment will be used to help others. All of his skin, bones, organs, and even part of his eyes were donated to help others live. Praise God!

God still gets all the praise and glory. I believe my cookbooks are a tool that God is using to open the doors for me to share the good news of His love. As an inspirational speaker, people will come listen to me, a cookbook lady, when they might never come to listen to a preacher. I believe my primary purpose is to encourage and inspire others to live lives with no regrets and to put God first in their lives.

Introduction

Of all the cookbooks I have written, Down Home Cookin’ Without the Down Home Fat, Busy People’s Low-Fat Cookbook, and Second Serving of Busy People’s Low-Fat Recipes, this book excites me the most because with a little bit of planning I am able to come home to a mouthwatering meal without having to wait at all to eat. I like that. I am confident without a doubt that you will also.

Whether you are a long-time user of slow cookers or this is your first time, I know you will enjoy this convenient and easy-to-use cookbook. Slow cookers are such time savers. Personally, I do not feel comfortable leaving home with my oven or stove on due to the risk of fire. However, cooking with a slow cooker is so safe that I don’t think twice about leaving it cooking unattended all day long. Unlike conventional cooking, the slow cookers use less electricity than your refrigerator.

I really believe you are going to be thrilled at the many creative and unique ways to use a slow cooker. How would you like to cook absolutely gorgeous and exquisite cakes with luscious warm berries or sauces oozing down the sides of tall cakes that looked like they took all day to prepare? However, in all reality you prepared it with seven or fewer ingredients, and it took only minutes to assemble.

Easy to Use

Do you like the idea of putting together an entire meal fit for a king (or queen) in ten minutes or less and yet have it appear as if you have been slaving in the kitchen all day? To top it off, you can be gone the entire time the slow cooker is working. There is no need for constant attention or stirring. All you have to do is assemble the ingredients.

Are you thinking you are too busy to even assemble the handful of ingredients you need to use to prepare a mouthwatering meal before you leave for the day? Have no fear. Here’s another great idea: Put the ingredients in the slow cooker the night before, and put the cooker in the refrigerator until the next morning. Then, in the morning, voila! Just take the cooker out of the refrigerator, plug it in, and turn it on before you leave. A scrumptious meal awaits you at home after a long day’s work, and all you have to do when you get home is be ready to eat. Does good old-fashioned, home-style cooking get any easier or more delicious than this? Trust me, your family will be grateful. Mine is.

Savings

Another reason that I love slow cookers is the cost savings. You can use less expensive