Looking for easy slow cooker dinner ideas & batch cooking tips!

[ChirpyUmberBiscuit]

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to get a head start on weekly meal planning and looking to expand my roster of reliable, family-friendly slow cooker dinners.

We love warm, comfort-food style meals (like slow-cooked meats, stews, and simple pasta sauces) that don't take hours of active prep in the evening. I've been browsing through a few ideas [here] to get started, but I'd love to hear what your absolute go-to recipes are!

Do you have any top recipes or batch-cooking tricks that always turn out great for your household?

Thanks in advance!

Pulled pork & char siu. I use pork shoulder, a joint or steaks. No need to marinade in a S.C. and both freeze well.

https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/pulled-chicken-black-bean-chilli
https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/great_sausage_casserole_73010
https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/easy-chicken-curry

I'm not a super fan of slow cooker recipes as I find they're often too watery, or can be tasteless - but the good ones I've made are all from Taming Twins: https://www.tamingtwins.com/category/collections/slow-cooker/

I have never had a batch cooking dud from Simple Home Edit: https://simplehomeedit.com/category/meal-prep/

I like the tips that the Batch Lady has about exactly how to make things in advance, freeze them, etc: https://thebatchlady.com/ and she has a series of videos that are pretty good.

https://thebatchlady.com/learn/learn-to-batch-module-8-3-for-the-fridge-3-for-the-freezer-and-10-meals-in-1-hour/ - I found this one particularly helpful. When I was batch cooking before, I would cook a huge cauldron of something, we'd eat it one night, then another night, and the third day we'd just not fancy it and it would go in freezer for ages, never get defrosted, and be chucked months later. Her schtick is that you make 5 different things with approx the same ingredients, each one doubled, to give you 10 meals but crucially you don't eat anything more than twice.

My favourite slow cooker book for this kind of thing is: Sara Lewis: Ultimate slow cooker | eBay UK. IMO, it's worth the ebay purchase cost for the butter chicken curry recipe alone.

The Good Food slow cooker book has loads of brilliant recipes that don't turn out watery. The difference seems to be taking time to brown meat and saute veg/spices beforehand rather than just throwing everything in at once in the morning before going to work.

We mostly do them at the weekend and freeze or refrigerate the leftovers for later consumption

Ooh, char siu in the slow cooker sounds amazing! Do you make your own glaze or do you use a store-bought sauce for it? Definitely adding pork shoulder to the shopping list for this weekend!

Bored of lunch on Instagram is good. Also like batch lady.

I just did a chicken and broccoli stew and it was really yummy. Chicken breasts (diced), broccoli , garlic, seasoning, a tub of cream cheese and some chicken stock. Had it over two nights, one night with roast potatoes and veg and the second night with rice.

My biggest slow cooker wins are

Slow cooker gammon joint - we’ll have it with egg and chips the first night and then cold with salad, coleslaw and crusty bread the next.
I also do a slow cooker chicken once a week and (yep!) can get 2-3 meals out of it (there’s only two of us though).
Today I have pork shoulder steaks in a Chinese style marinade on the go, I’m about to add some frozen sweetcorn/green beans and diced spring onions to it. We’ll have that with some microwave rice about 6pm - so easy.

I often do meals like a chilli, curry or Bolongese sauce and double up on the ingredients. Then put 1/2 in the freezer straight away. Just make sure you don't freeze with added milk products like cream ot cheese...

Another cheap, delicious and freezable favorite:
www.butcherbakerblog.com/2014/03/21/slow-cooked-lentil-ragu/