The DASH Diet Slow Cooker Cookbook - Healthy Heart Recipes for Weight Loss & Blood Pressure Control | Perfect for Busy Families & Meal Prep

Some of the people in our circle of family and friends are supposed to follow the DASH diet. When I saw this cookbook, I knew I wanted to try it. One of the reasons people don't eat in a healthier manner is that they think it is too difficult or complicated to employ healthy cooking strategies. I have long been a fan of the ease and simplicity of using slow cookers. It makes healthy cooking much easier, I think.Dash Done Slow has 162 pages. It has 10 chapters including Dash Diet 101, Dash into Slow Cooking, Kitchen Staples, Soups, Stews /Curries / Chilies, Vegetarian & Vegan, Poultry and Seafood, Beef/ Pork/ Lamb, Side DIshes & Appetizers, and Desserts & Treats. The recipes are quick and easy to prepare. The recipes each take up one page and no more.Some of the recipes are very simple indeed. The recipe for "Baked" Sweet Potatoes has 1 ingredient - you guessed it - scrubbed sweet potatoes. You wrap them in foil and cook them on low in your slow cooker for 8 hours, and unwrap them to serve. This may be the first recipe I have ever seen with a solo ingredient!I think there are some great helpful additions on some of the recipe pages. Some recipes have a write-up in the margin of a Precooking Tip for that specific recipe. Other recipes have A Balanced Meal margin addition - what other foods you can serve with that recipe to make a balanced meal.The first recipe I tried from this cookbook was Peach - Bourbon Chicken. It combines skinless boneless chicken thighs, fresh peaches, tomato sauce, bourbon, apple cider vinegar, maple syrup, liquid smoke, garlic powder, sea salt and cayenne pepper. You put the chicken in the slow cooker, combine all the other ingredients in a saucepan and cook the sauce, mashing up the peaches. You pour the cooked sauce over the chicken thighs and cook them in your slow cooker for 8 hours. I'll have to confess - I did not have any bourbon so I left it out when I prepared this recipe. We enjoyed this entree. The chicken came out meltingly tender. I thought the sauce was a little thin and could have been improved with a little cornstarch to thicken it.Next, staying with a chicken theme, I prepared the recipe for Lime & Jalapeno Chicken Thighs. The recipe was easy to prepare with only 8 ingredients.(I did omit the fresh cilantro garnish when serving). I adjusted the amount of ingredients and doubled the recipe to have enough for a meal for another night. The chicken was nice and tender and had a nice tang of lime. The sauce was plentiful although thin instead of the "sweet, spicy, sticky glaze" in the recipe description. It was a recipe that our family enjoyed.The last recipe that I have cooked so far from this cookbook is the one for Sloppy Joes. Again, it is a simple recipe with only 10 ingredients. The apple cider vinegar in this recipe gives it a nice tang! The vegetables are plentiful and and add color and interest to this entree. The recipe suggests you serve this Sloppy Joe mixture in iceberg lettuce leaves. I think Romaine or red leaf lettuce leaves would make better "containers" for the Sloppy Joe mixture. The sauce was thin and could have benefitted from the addition of a large can of tomato paste. We did like this recipe.We enjoyed trying the recipes from this Dash Done Slow Cookbook. All three of the recipes I tried were a bit bland. They could have benefited by the addition of the no-salt 21 herb and spice blend that I love to use on almost everything. I will continue to use this cookbook because I appreciate the DASH homestyle, simple and healthy recipes and the ease of slow cooking. I received this product at a discounted rate in exchange for my honest and unbiased review.