Diet Friendly Fast Food

Use the CrockPot to cook this Spicy Brown Rice and Black Bean Cheesy Bowl and keep the kitchen cool.

When you live where it's hot in the summer, using the slow cooker to cook amazing food without heating up the house is one of the best tricks I know.  In fact, on my slow cooker site I feature Slow Cooker Summer Dinners each year, and this Slow Cooker Spicy Brown Rice and Black Bean Bowl would make a perfect summer dinner cooked in the CrockPot.  It took me a couple of tries to get this recipe just right, and for the final version I had the wild idea of cutting up some cubes of string cheese and stirring them into the rice and beans mixture for the last 30 minutes of cooking time, so this is a spicy brown rice and black bean cheesy bowl.  Everyone likes cheesy don't they?  I tested several versions of this out on my niece Kara and her family, and they gave the thumbs up to the version with cheese, but it's definitely optional if you prefer it without the cheese.

I loved everything about this easy salad with green beans, tomatoes, and Feta!

(For Phase One Fridays I highlight Phase One recipes from the past that have been my personal favorites, and this amazing Green Bean, Tomato, and Feta Salad Oreganato is something I would happily eat over and over all summer long.  If you have green beans in your garden, please make this salad right away before the beans are gone!)

Yes, I know there have been a lot of salads and garden vegetables around here lately, but when I made this salad with green beans, tomatoes, feta cheese, and a vinegary-lemony-oregano dressing, I loved it so much that I thought I should share the recipe while people still had garden green beans. I actually found this recipe in a Woman's World Magazine when I sat waiting for an appointment, and I got the receptionist to photocopy the page for me! I added the the Feta, which I thought was a perfect flavor with this salad, but what really makes this is the tangy dressing that has both red wine vinegar and fresh lemon juice. If you have garden beans or good fresh beans from the store, please make this salad!

(For Phase One Fridays I feature Phase One Recipes from the past that have been my personal favorites, and I love this Shrimp and Black Bean Salad with Cilantro, Cumin, and Lime.  Photos for this recipe were updated May 2014 and I'm so happy to have better photos for this favorite salad!)

Shrimp, black beans, cilantro, and lime. It's a combination that goes together so well that you could easily come up with hundreds of recipes featuring this quartet. I bought a big bag of cooked frozen shrimp from Costco, and this was a salad I made for lunch after thinking to myself, hmmm, what else can I make with shrimp? The ingredients were determined by what I had in the fridge and pantry, as well as a well-documented love for cilantro, and this recipe has cilantro in the dressing and more cilantro in the salad, which is just fine with me.  If you're not a cilantro fan I think you could still get a pretty good result with thinly sliced green onion replacing the cilantro in the dressing and just using a little more green onion in the salad, but I wouldn't use parsley in place of cilantro here.

(For Phase One Fridays I feature Phase One Recipes from the past that have been my personal favorites.  This Slow Cooker Cannellini Bean Stew with Tomatoes, Italian Sausage, and Kale has some of my favorite flavors, and I love adding the kale near the end of the cooking time so it's still a little chewy in the stew.)

My friend Lydia and I have both become quite infatuated with experiments in our slow cookers, and the experimental part in this Slow Cooker Cannellini Bean Stew with Tomatoes, Italian Sausage, and Kale was adding the kale to the slow cooker after the other ingredients had cooked for a few hours.  I was really thrilled with how the raw kale softened perfectly in the slow cooker with just a little more cooking time, and the slightly chewy kale was one of my favorite parts of this dish!