Fix-It & Forget-It Lightly: Healthy Low-Fat Recipes for Your Slow Cooker (Fix-It and Forget-It) Author: Phyllis Pellman Good. Over 500 healthy low-fat recipes for your slow cooker.

I was browsing around the book store when I found this great cookbook about a year ago. I was very excited then and have since made a LOT of the recipes in it that are easy and healthy to make – and the best part is the ones I have made so far are delicious.

Fix-It & Forget-It Lightly is packed full of low calorie, yummy ideas, and a tons of them are low sodium too (and most are easily adapted to be even lower in sodium), and you can adjust the seasonings to your taste and add more veggies – the recipes are very versatile.

The recipes are easy, quick, and a lot have only a few ingredients. They are family home-style meals and my hubby and daugther enjoy them also. I highly recommend this book — it’s a healthy, low-calorie cook book that doesn’t feel like a diet cookbook at all, with recipes I know myself and my family will enjoy long after I lose all the weight I need to.

Just to start off with, I had over 50 recipes on my list to try first, such as:

  • low fat slow cooker barbeque (110 calories)
  • meatball mushroom soup (100 calories)
  • chicken soup pot (100 calories)
  • zucchini vegtable pot (80 calories)
  • steak and gravy (170 calories)
  • sweet and sour chicken over rice (330 calories)
  • pork chop combo (280 calories)
  • 10 layer slow cooker dish with ground beef (370 calories)

Most of the recipes are for 6 and 8 servings, there are a few for 4 and up to 12 servings, but the recipes can easily be doubled or cut in half depending on your needs and family size. A lot of the recipes are a complete meal all in one pot, so they make a great make-ahead meal to freeze and serve during the week. Others just need to heat up a little steamed veggie on the side, or add a tossed salad and whole grain roll.

For me (with a family of 3) a recipe for 6 works out great because I can fix it for a family meal — 1 serving each for my daughter and I and two servings for hubby (he’s a big guy over 6′), and I have two left over for me to take to lunch, have as leftovers later in the week, or freeze to use on a night when hubby and daughter are having something else that isn’t on my diet plan.

Slow cooker (crock pot casserole type) recipes remind me of comfort foods (back in my 20′s and 30′s I used one for making meals a couple times a week). The dishes are warm, everything is tender and moist and very, very yummy. They are also great for cooking in the heat because you don’t need to turn on the oven. They are also awesome time savers because you just toss everything in and then go off to do something else for a few hours. Most recipes are economical too because you can use very inexpensive cuts of meat and they turn out very, very tender. You also don’t need a lot of fancy ingredients since the flavor comes from the slow cooking and blending off all the wholesome ingredients and veggies, and a few favorite seasions that you toss in the pot.

As the times changed, the crock pot wasn’t used as much as microwaves were added to every home and more prepackaged frozen meals became available. But prepackaged foods are packed full of sodium. And they don’t have that warm, yummy home-cooked flavor that comes from a meal that has been made from fresh ingredients, familiar family seasonings, and simmered for a long time.

Now that I am eating healthy – low calorie and low sodium (which means a lot less prepackaged foods) I am definitely glad I found this book and will go back to using the crock pot a lot. I plan on getting a couple more crock pots (I only own two now) and a large two tier steamer so I can cook several meals all at once on my counter. That way I can cook two weeks or more worth of meals (thank goodness for freezers) in one day on the weekend and I won’t even have to heat up the kitchen or spend all day cooking because I can just roughly chop, toss in, plug in, turn on and go about my day. It doesn’t get any healthier, quicker, easier and delicious then that!

My Rating: 5 halos

Dust off your old crock pot or get a new one (or two) and give these recipes a try. You will be glad you did.

This is the one I use and I like it alot: Rival Oval Programmable Stainless Steel Crock Pot (5.5-qt).

FYI: All the reviews are done for FREE, to learn more about the ratings or to arrange for a review, see Lady Rose’s Reviews.

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Currently Diet Pulpit is rarely updated. Lady Rose is now blogging at Blissful Moon, where she is staying healthy and continuing to have adventures, please stop by and visit.

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