Easy Dinner Hack: Turn Any Recipe into a Crockpot Meal

Finding easy dinner hacks is one of the main themes of my adult life. I have four kids, life is busy, and having easy dinner ideas is important for our whole family. Everyone loves to eat.

My favorite way to make cooking dinner easier is to turn just about any recipe I find into a crock pot recipe.

Why? For a few reasons:

-The hours after the kids and my husband get home from school are the most exhausting, chaotic hours. Add trying to get to evening sports practices to that, and you can forget being able to focus on creating a healthy well balanced dinner.

-I have time to start dinner around lunch time. At that point, the house is quieter, and I can focus on what I am doing. That makes cooking a lot easier.

But the main reason I like to change most dinners to crock pot recipes is that it turns any meal into an easier one step kind of task.

I do not enjoy cooking things with fifty different steps. You know? I do not want to get out a gallon ziplock bag, a bowl for mixing that, a pan for boiling this other, a colander, a sauce pan, and then have to clean it all up.

No thank you. If I see more than a few steps in a recipe, I am out of here.

That is the beauty of the slow cooker. Everything all just mushes in there together at once. It makes everything yummy and tender. Then I can just set it up and forget it for a few hours. What’s not to love?

I could write a whole poem, an ode to my crock pot. Maybe I’m a fanatic…

I made this video to walk you through an example recipe of how I take a regular oven recipe and turn it into a crock pot dish.

In the video, I admitted I had not used that particular recipe for “Parmesan Dijon Chicken” in a while. Y’all, it turned out way more delicious than I even expected.

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Here are a few crockpot tips, most of which I mention in the video:

-The crockpot is a wet environment, so you do not have to dip your chicken in butter, then bread, etc. Skip all those extra steps. Just place all the ingredients in there together.

-Be careful about over-cooking. If you do this at 8am, you need to have someone home around 3pm to turn the crockpot off or switch it to a “keep warm” setting.

-Using frozen chicken will help you not overcook it.

-If you start your meal at lunch, it will be perfect at five o’clock, unless it is a large roast. For a large roast, you do need eight hours.

-Roasts take longer to get perfectly tender.

–Dale’s Steak Seasoning or some kind of vinegar will go a long way to tenderize tough beef.

-If you use fresh or frozen green beans in there, make sure they are submerged in liquid.

-I add in pasta or instant rice in the last hour of cooking, fully submerged in the meat juices.

-I did not add pasta to the Parmesan Dijon Chicken in the video. Instead, I served it with mashed potatoes.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask below.

For more easy dinner ideas, see my easy week of gluten free dinners here.

I hope you give this a try and do some slow cooking!