Tasty Traditional Collard Greens

Today's post is a special one!  For the first time ever on my blog, I have a guest poster!  My handsome and clever husband has agreed to write up and share his famous recipe for collard greens.  First off, let me say that I am generally not a big fan of greens.  In fact, I was not a big fan of even my husband's greens for a long time (despite most people loving them).  However, being the amazing husband he is, he worked on the recipe over several years, and eventually created a collard green recipe that even I could love!  This recipe involves a lot of time and effort, but is well worth it.  It makes a fantastic side dish for Thanksgiving or Christmas, and is the perfect dish to make to bring you luck on New Years Day.

Slow Cooker Carnitas

For Father's Day this year, I decided to make my husband one of his absolute favorite dishes:  carnitas!  However, I also wanted to spend the day celebrating how awesome of a dad my husband is, and not just be stuck in the kitchen all day, so I decided to use a slow cooker recipe.  The beauty of a slow cooker is that it can turn the toughest and cheapest of meats into the juiciest, tenderest of meats. The blog Gimme Some Oven has a fantastic recipe that I used as a base, only altering some of the seasonings to fit my own needs.  The result?  Perfect carnitas that only tasted like I spent the day in the kitchen making them!

Slow Cooker Sriracha & Honey BBQ Chicken

I remember the first time I laid eyes upon Sriracha Sauce, a spicy garlic chili sauce sent straight from heaven.  It was almost a decade ago, and I noticed bottles of it sitting on every table at the Dekalb Farmer's Market's cafeteria. Feeling adventurous, I squeezed a little bit onto some roasted eggplant I was enjoying.  I fell immediately in love.  It's spicy and garlicky, and adds the perfect amount of heat to pretty much any entree or side dish you can think of.  So when I saw a recipe for Slow-Cooker Honey Sriracha Barbecue Chicken from Foodie with Family, I made it immediately.  I altered the recipe just a tad, and I changed the way it was served in order to make it healthier and lighter.  The result?  A sweet and spicy barbecue that is easily made in your slow cooker.  Made with Sriracha AND easy to make? Score!

Buffalo Chicken & Avocado Lettuce Wraps

Ever since I started making Slow Cooker Buffalo Chicken, I've been trying to come up with different ways to eat the huge amount of chicken the recipe yields.  So far my favorite way to serve the buffalo chicken is by making Buffalo Chicken & Avocado Lettuce Wraps.  It's quick to make, tastes phenomenal, and is very low carb. You don't have to do the slow cooker method to make the buffalo chicken part of this recipe if you don't want to. Feel free to cook and shred the chicken any way you please.  I do have some product recommendations though.  First of all, Frank's Red Hot Buffalo Sauce is the tastiest buffalo sauce I've tried at my local grocery store. I highly recommend it.  Secondly, if you are looking for a healthy, low calorie blue cheese dressing, I cannot say enough good things about Bolthouse Farm's Chunky Blue Cheese dressing.  It's made from yogurt, has only 35 calories per 2 tablespoons, and tastes eons better than any other low calorie dressing I have tried.  It's good stuff!

Slow Cooker Garam Masala Chicken

Most slow cooker recipes are basically the same old boring chicken or beef recipe, so I'm always on the lookout for more original and creative slow cooker recipes.  I recently found a recipe for Crock Pot Garam Masala on a blog called Peanut Butter Fingers, and I was intrigued by the seasoning it utilized. I had never cooked with Garam Masala before, so I didn't know quite what to expect. Turns out that Garam Masala is an intense mixture of Indian spices; an aromatic blend that really jazzed up the normally bland ingredients of chicken and cauliflower. The dish was easy to make, delicious, and healthy. I felt like it needed a little heat, so I stirred in a generous amount of Sriracha Sauce, and it was just perfect.

Slow Cooker Chicken & Sweet Potato Curry

My husband's fall garden yielded a huge amount of sweet potatoes this year, and I've been trying to come up with recipes that will utilize them.  This is not a difficult task, as our family loves sweet potatoes.  The weather has finally turned chilly, so I decided to make a chicken curry and swap out the regular potatoes for the nutritionally superior sweet potatoes.  I'm glad I did, because it turned out fantastic.  This dish is easy, inexpensive to make, and has the added benefit of being healthy and diet friendly.  Plus, it makes your belly warm and happy on these cold winter evenings.

Black Bean & Sweet Potato Chili

Happy Fall!  Okay, I know, technically the season of fall began two months ago. However, in Georgia, it doesn't actually feel like fall until November.  Today is November 1st, and it is finally cold enough to put a little frost on the grass in the early morning.  In celebration, I made my first pot of hot, comforting stew of the season:  Black Bean & Sweet Potato Chili.  My lovely friend Jessica sent me the recipe a few weeks ago, and I took one look at the recipe, and fell in love.  Sweet Potatoes? Cocoa Powder? Cinnamon?  In a chili?!  I had to make it!  

Slow Cooker Fiesta Chicken

The latest recipe "Pin" I'm seeing popping everywhere is actually unnamed; instead just described as "The Easiest Dinner Ever", with a picture of chicken, tomatoes, and a block of cream cheese sitting in a slow cooker.  Since I love all three of these things, I decided this would be my next Pinterest recipe to test.  

Slow Cooker Salsa Chicken

The type of meals that my husband and I cook now are vastly different than the type of meals we cooked two years ago.  Before we were parents, we routinely made intricate, time-consuming meals, using only the finest ingredients.  We made as much as we could from scratch; why buy something already made, when we could make it ourselves healthier and tastier?  But then we had a baby. We no longer had hours available to us to cook.  For the first 3 months of my daughter's life, we lived off frozen dinners or already prepared casseroles.  It was awful for foodies like us.  Now that she is older, we have more time to cook, but not nearly as much as we did in our childless days.  I imagine things are only going to get worse as she gets older.  So meals like Salsa Chicken, another Pinterest find, are a must every now and then.  This recipe is ridiculously easy, and uses ingredients you can find in your pantry and freezer.

Buffalo Chicken Tacos

I came up with this recipe after making a large amount of Slow Cooker Buffalo Chicken. I really recommend you check out that recipe first, so you already have buffalo chicken on hand. If not, just cut up and cook some chicken and then toss with Buffalo Hot Sauce.

Slow Cooker Buffalo Chicken

I saw a recipe for Slow Cooker Buffalo Chicken on Pinterest recently, and knew I had to try it out. The original recipe is from My Kitchen Apron. I changed the recipe just a tad.

Slow Cooker Pork & Sauerkraut

I learned about this recipe several years ago, from my lovely Sister-in-Law Brittany.  It is one of those great recipes that is both amazingly easy and inexpensive.  It literally has only three ingredients, and has the added bonus of being able to feed a large amount of people.

Slow Cooker Indian Chicken Stew

I love slow cooker meals.  You can throw a bunch of inexpensive ingredients in a pot, turn it on low, leave the house, and come back to a delicious meal.  However, most of my go-to slow cooker meals are kind of boring.  Tasty, but not very adventurous.  So when I saw Slow Cooker Indian Chicken Stew on Pinterest, I pinned it immediately, knowing it was going to be one of those pins I actually make.