Crockpot Recipe Reviews

To Die for Crock Pot Roast

• I love pot roast. It's one of my favorite comfort foods. This is a very simple recipe, but it calls for some high-sodium gravy and salad dressing mixes. In order to cut down on the sodium, I used half of each packet, and the roast was still good.
• We added a bag of baby carrots and 5 peeled and quartered potatoes at the end. I let just the roast, seasonings, and water cook on low for 5 hours. Then I took out the roast, and added the potatoes and carrots to the bottom of the crockpot, and put the roast on top of it. I cooked that on high for 2 more hours.
• Also, since we have a larger crockpot, I added 1.5 cups of water, instead of just 1/2 cup.
• I think we used a 3 or 4 pound chuck roast, and we had a lot of leftovers. We don't mind having a lot of leftovers (we froze some) because we both love pot roast.

Crockpot Potato Soup

• We didn't change anything about this recipe's ingredients, and we both thought it was really good. This was another easy to make recipe.
• You can buy lower-sodium bouillon, if you want to reduce the salt in this recipe. I also didn't add a whole teaspoon of salt. I added a teaspoon of black pepper, though, and I thought it flavored the soup nicely.
• Finally, instead of using a slotted spoon and a traditional blender in step 3, an immersion blender makes things a lot easier. Transferring hot soup ingredients from a crockpot, to a blender, and then back into the crockpot is a lot of effort... and if you're me, a lot could go wrong during that process. Immersion blenders are the best :)

Crock Pot Chicken with Black Beans and Cream Cheese

• In this post (towards the bottom of it), I referred to trying out a Crockpot Salsa Chicken recipe. Both of us thought that the recipe in that post was WAY too salty.
• I came across this recipe and decided to try it out. The cream cheese probably does not make it low-fat, but I think that it would still be good without the cream cheese.
• We used frozen corn instead of canned corn.
• I also liked that the recipe suggested using frozen chicken breasts; we always have frozen chicken breasts in our freezer... and we don't always remember to thaw them.
• The night before we made this, I made a batch of rice, and put it in the fridge.
• Instead of cooking it on high for 4-5 hours, I cooked it on low while I was at work (about 8 hours, including commuting time), and then added the cream cheese when I got home, and turned the crockpot up to high. After 30 minutes, the cream cheese was softened, but we still had to stir it so it would be a little more evenly distributed.
• Then we heated up the rice in the microwave and served this on top of rice. We both really liked it, and we had plenty of leftovers.