The Healthy Slow Cooker Revolution

The first edition of America’s Test Kitchen’s slow cooker cookbook was published in 2011, and Healthy Slow Cooker Revolution is the third one published in trade paperback (were the first two unhealthy?). The test kitchen staff assembled two hundred recipes for this cookbook, from soups to desserts. The recipe layout is excellent, with each recipe on a single page, many beautifully illustrated, and the writing is good and easy to follow. The introduction claims that the staff aimed for recipes to take fifteen minutes of active kitchen time. But including peeling, chopping, slicing, microwaving, and so on, very few home cooks can achieve this—for most, it would be at least twice that long. Each recipe gives slow cooking time, a nice headnote (“Why This Recipe Works”), and nutritional information. Every recipe is color tagged on the edge of the page either as easy prep, vegetarian, or both. For most recipes, you microwave some ingredients, for some you use a food processor or a blender. The lists of recipe ingredients are mostly fairly long, discouraging those who dislike cooking. For some recipes, stovetop would be preferable to slow cooker.