A slow cooker might be your most underutilized kitchen appliance, but it's time to bring it out! When you're short on time, just pile in the ingredients, set the heat on low, and let the cooking happen. After being at the office all day, you'll get hooked on coming back to a healthy meal. And since you don't have to plan an elaborate meal, you can still hit up the gym or run some last-minute errands before dinner starts.
Aside from saving time, you'll also be wasting less. Grab those leftover veggies that are sitting in the crisper, add in some lean meats, your favorite spices, and some broth, and you've got the makings of a homemade stew. If you have a few minutes to spare, lightly sauté the vegetables before you toss them in the slow cooker; this will help develop extra flavor in the dish. And for anyone who's always scrambling to throw together a healthy lunch, let the slow cooker do the work for you. After you enjoy dinner, most recipes will stay warm well into the next day for a brown-bag lunch. Get started with any one of these 10 healthy stew recipes.
Source: Instagram user og_reta
It's freezing in San Francisco, and I think it's high time I broke out 
Ever since 
A couple of weeks ago, I didn't understand 
"What's the point of a slow cooker?" a friend recently asked me. "I don't get how cooking with one is any different from cooking in a Dutch oven." I can see her point, especially when a recipe calls for browning meat in a pot before simmering in a slow cooker. Worse yet, I hate slow cooker recipes that have a cooking time of one hour. In these cases, you might as well use the stove. But I do love the convenience of dumping something into a machine in the morning, and returning to a fully-cooked meal at the end of the day (for recipe ideas, check out our 
