This oatmeal is an easy way to invite your senses to wake up and start the day.  I love the surprise of removing the crock pot lid and seeing a beautiful bright purple, smelling the sweet steam and seeing the little bubbles around the edges on this thick and smooth oatmeal.

This would be a great holiday dish, easy to serve to overnight guests and would even be great for a morning meeting at work.  Seriously, they make portable crock pots for a reason! Enjoy this sweet treat for breakfast tomorrow. If you spend the rest of the day humming “Purple Rain” or singing “Flying Purple People Eater” to your kids, you can thank me later.

2 c. quick oats

2. c. water

1 c. milk

1 T. vanilla

1 can cherry pie filling

1 c. frozen blueberries

Put everything in the crockpot, stir gently and cook on “keep warm” for 8 hours over night. When you mix this in the morning, stir gently so you don’t make the blueberries fall apart— they will be juicy and ready to explode.

A friend of mine wants to use her crock pot more, but has an allergy to tomatoes. After doing a little research, I agreed with her– most crock pot recipes seem to have some sort of tomato or tomato-based product in them! It is an injustice that my friend should not be able to embrace easy crock pot cooking more often. So, my next few recipes will definitely not be red.  And if it’s just that you don’t like tomatoes, these might just become some of your new favorites too.

This is an easy potato casserole that gets jazzed up by the cheese and chips.  Since the french word for potato is “pomme de terre”, I am honoring my friend Tara with this recipe for “Pomme de Tara”.   Enjoy! 🙂

(Is there a recipe you’d like to see or an ingredient you’d like to avoid?? Click on my contact page and send me a note– I’m happy to post something just for YOU!)

6-8 potatoes, diced

1 onion, chopped

4 T. butter, melted

1 c.  milk

1 c. sour cream

1-2 garlic cloves, chopped fine

1 t. parsley

salt and pepper

1 cup Cool Ranch Doritos– crunched up into little bitty pieces

1 cup shredded cheddar cheese

Put potatoes and onions in the crockpot first. In a separate bowl, mix together melted butter, milk,  sour cream and seasonings. Pour mixture over potatoes and onions and stir. Cook on low for 6 hours. Turn pot off and mix shredded cheese and Doritos into pot, but don’t overstir– you don’t want your soft potatoes to turn into mashed potatoes.  Feel free to top this with crumbled bacon, chives or green onions. Makes a great side dish for breakfast, lunch or dinner!

Growing up, my dad really liked tapioca pudding and I could never understand why he enjoyed eating eyeballs. They looks gooey and slimey and smelled like playdough.  I also remember seeing vats of it at chinese buffet restaurants and was again reminded of things like eyeballs and fish eggs.

Then I discovered that with a little love, it could actually be a delicious treat. The addition of vanilla and cinnamon make this more of a dessert, but I wouldn’t be opposed to eating it for breakfast. As an additional note—tapioca pearls are also a great way to thicken up desserts, stews and sauces, but use the small pearls in those instances.

Try serving this dish with vanilla wafers or a few little chocolate cookies that might be “thin” and “minty”. If you eat it warm, you might also like it with some pound cake and fresh fruit.

4 cups milk

1/2 c. sugar

1/2 c. tapioca

2 eggs, lightly beaten

1 t. vanilla

1/2 t. cinnamon

pinch nutmeg

Mix everything together in the crock pot and then cook on low for 4 hours or on high for about 2 hours. Can be served warm or cold.

It doesn’t have to be Thanksgiving to enjoy a side dish that can be a year round favorite.  I like to go to restaurants and just order an array of side dishes as my meal— green bean casserole, mac and cheese, mashed potatoes and scalloped apples are some of my favorites. Let’s be honest, it’s a good thing Cracker Barrel doesn’t have a buffet.

Side dishes can be dangerous though. All these creamy, cheesy, salty tastes can be brief in moments, but high in fat and calories. This crockpot version of green been cassarole saves some calories by using fresh onions instead of fried ones and also adds water chestnuts for the crunchy texture.

Try this crockpot cassarole with any of your favorite meals. And if you eat it as a main course… I’m ok with that too.

1 28 oz. can green beans

1 can diced water chestnuts

1 can cream of mushroom soup

1/2 c. milk

1 t. soy sauce

1 clove garlic, minced

1/2 medium onion, sliced thin

1/2 t. pepper

Mix together soup, milk  and soy sauce. Put green beans, water chestnuts and onion in crockpot and then dump liquid mixture and mix through once. Don’t overmix it or else the canned green beans will fall apart. Cook 4 hours on low.

Good morning, friends! While this is technically breakfast and not dinner, I figured a nice, warm meal would be a good way to start Monday morning.  After reading pages of posts online, I decided that the only way to figure this recipe out would just be to avoid all the major complaints that people had about the other recipes. So, to save you the time of researching everyone else’s negativity, here is the insight and recipe that I have to share with you.

1. Cook time: I suggest 8 hours on the “keep warm” setting. Everyone else said to cook the oatmeal for 4 hours on low, but who wants to get up in the middle of the night to start breakfast?! Cooking on “keep warm” means you can wake up looking rested, too.

2. Burnt edges: The downside of crockpot cooking is the clean up. I’ve been known to let a burnt pot sit for a couple days. My mother-in-law and I used to joke that we were just letting the dirty ones soak in hopes that someone else would scrub them clean. You can buy crockpot liners which makes clean up super easy and keeps complaining and procrastination to a minimum.

3.  Oats: There areusually three types of oats at the grocery store– quick oats, regular oats and steel-cut oats. If you vary the recipe, you can use any of these, but since I have quick oats in the pantry at all times, that is what I use. Steel cut oats are probably best for crockpotting because of their tough exterior. And yes, I might have just made up that word– crockpotting does look pretty funny, but it’s grammatically correct if “to crockpot” was an actual verb.

2 c. quick oats

2 cups water

1 cup milk

1 apple, peeled, cored and diced

1/2 c. dried cranberries

1/2 c. applesauce

1/2 t. cinnamon

1 t. vanilla

1/4 c. brown sugar

Add everything to the pot and give it a stir. Set crockpot to “keep warm” setting for 8 hours or to low for 4 hours. Cook overnight for breakfast in the morning, then reheat leftovers with a little bit of water and half and half for breakfast the following day.