Paleo Slow Cooking: Gluten Free Recipes Made Simple [Paperback]

Chrissy Gower (Author), Robb Wolf (Foreword)

Book Description

Release date: October 1, 2012

Although eating a paleo diet (no gluten, grains, dairy, or legumes) has proven to be highly effective in shedding unwanted weight and improving overall health, many find preparing and cooking real-food meals on a daily basis difficult to manage. Let's face it, prepping and cooking meals, as well as cleaning multiple pots and pans, can take a lot of time from your already hectic schedule. Not to mention the difficulties in making healthy food taste delicious. Enter the slow cooker, an easy-to-use devise that allows you to enjoy a wonderful, home-cooked meal without slaving for hours in the kitchen.

In Paleo Slow Cooking, Chrissy Gower shows you that cooking real food using a variety of vegetables, clean cuts of meat, and healthy fats does not have to be a complicated, boring, or time-consuming endeavor. In this real-food-made-easy guide, Gower teaches you how to prepare full-course paleo/primal entrees, soups, stews, breakfast dishes, and desserts. To make every meal more enjoyable, Gower also includes several quick and easy side dishes to go with your slow cooker meals.

Paleo Slow Cooking is sure to win the hearts of every time-crunched individual or family that yearns to eat a healthier diet. Eating paleo has never been so easy or tasted so good!

Editorial Reviews

Review

Chrissy Gower has made paleo as accesible, easy, and delicious as possible. Busy families everywhere will appreciate having this resource to turn to when looking for a way to cut down time spent in the kitchen in order to spend more time with the ones they love. Thank you Chrissy for providing such an excellent resource for families who want to live the healthiest life possible!<—Sarah Fragoso, National Best Selling Author of <i>Everyday Paleo, Everyday Paleo Family Cookbook,</i> and <i>Everyday Paleo Around the World: Italian Cuisine</I> www.everydaypaleo.com

About the Author

Chrissy Gower is a hard working wife and mother of two that is committed to educating families on how to live a healthier lifestyle. As a personal trainer out of the famed Nor Cal Strength and Conditioning gym, she has helped countless individuals and families successfully implement a paleo diet. She also runs the highly successful blog, www.growinguppaleo.com

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Victory Belt Publishing; Original edition (October 1, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1936608693
• ISBN-13: 978-1936608690
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 0.7 x 10.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (161 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,181 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #7 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Diets & Weight Loss > Gluten Free
  • #15 in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Special Appliances
  • #17 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Diets & Weight Loss > Paleo

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

384 of 396 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Good but by no means "great" September 26, 2012

By RoninTG

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I received my copy of "Paleo Slow Cooking" by Chrissy Gower today and I am slightly disappointed. While the majority of the recipes do look tasty I personally feel as a cookbook this particular book has a few major missteps. The first being a heavy use of "Penzeys" brand spices and El Pato brand sauces. A majority of the recipes in this book call for the use of specific Penzeys blends with no side-note on how to replicate the blend on your own by utilizing your own personal spices. I suppose I could go to Penzeys website, read the ingredients listed for the spice blend and reconstruct it at home... but that adds another step for me when attempting to prepare a dish. I feel this is a serious disservice to purchasers of the book. The use of El Pato brand sauces is not as prevalent but my complaint remains the same. The only explanation the author provides of the El Pato sauce is "Use the green can". I would have preferred a description of exactly what type of sauce it was so I could substitute with a brand I know and trust although personally I'd rather make the sauce myself than rely on a canned product.

In my opinion it was also a mistake to not have pictures of how she describes lining the crockpot with parchment paper. The instructions are clear enough, but they would have been crystal clear with an accompanying photo set, especially since a few of the deserts and practically all of the breakfast recipes call for this particular step.

Lastly, I also felt that a number of the recipes can be prepared quicker and with one less item to clean on the stove top. For a slow cooker book to have recipes that are quicker to prepare on the stove without the headache of cleaning the crockpot just doesn't seem well thought out to me.

Overall, I feel this is a decent cookbook with good recipes that rely too heavily on specific branded ingredients with out giving the reader alternatives, or a breakdown so they can use ingredients they may personally already own. I feel someone new to the Paleo lifestyle or cooking in general may feel they need to buy the specific brands she lists in the recipes in order to prepare the food presented in this book and that in my opinion feels a little too much like a commercial and less like a Paleo cookbook.

212 of 226 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Also disapointed October 3, 2012

By S. Craig

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I agree with what a lot of the other reviewers have stated in terms of disapointments in the book. I preordered it. I have bought slow cooker books in the past, and was so disapointed in their use of canned/bottled/premade "food" all thrown in a pot and heated up. I have been eating paleo for a couple years now, and felt that this would bring the two worlds together nicely. Paleo pretty much is no sugar (something we are very hardcore about in our house) and no processed foods. How could this book not rock with those as the basis? Well...

I'm going to sound nit-picky, and if this review bothers you, then this is the book for you and it's where you are in your food journey. Some of you are more like me and care a little bit more. So here are the details that bothered me.

1) I'm on the GAPS diet. Not a big deal. Very compatible with paleo. Only problem is sweet potatoes aren't allowd on the GAPS diet (sad... I know!). This book uses them A LOT. I think it might possibly be her favorite veggie. It's listed in 7 recipes in the index, but I counted an aditional 5 that include sweet potatoes that aren't even listed in the index. That makes a total of 12 recipes that call for them. I can substitute I realize, but just throwing it out there if you are a low carb person, or for some reason can't handle them, they are used pretty heavily.

2) She really doesn't worry about added sugar. This bothered me a lot. On page 118 is her recipe for BBQ sauce (one of the FEW recipes for something, not just calling for a bottle!). I was excited she included a recipe for BBQ sauce until I read it. It calls for 2 cups of organic ketchup. UGH! The second ingredient on the label is sugar in that stuff, even the organic. Then it also calls for 1/2 cup honey with that. UGH! To much for our little family. Lastly, this same recipe calls for liquid smoke. Uhhh last time I checked that was full of preservatives, weird things you can't pronounce and is a carcinogen. Lame sauce!

3) Someone else touched on this, but lame recipes. Saute broccoli? Really? Moving on.

4) On page 176 it called for taco seasoning. AHhhhhh!!! Sadly, store bought taco seasoning is full of nasty stuff with an ingredients label that reads like a chemistry textbook. If you've been wondering how to replace those small packets of MSG-riddled spices with something real, make your own blend. But sadly, she doesn't list a single spice blend in her book. Instead of the 50 page useless intro (really, we know we need to own knives to make some recipes), a bunch of spice blends would have been much more useful.

5) Just hitting on a couple other fails-
- El Pao sauce, and green chiles from a can both used heavily. Canned food was one of the things I was trying to get rid of when buying this book.
- PG. 170 calls for bottled BBQ sauce (even though she has a lame-sauce recipes listed)
-PG. 154 calls for tabasco brand hot sauce. This might not be a big deal, but the last batch I bought had food dyes as well as preservatives. Not all have this. Read labels
-PG. 140 calls for worcestershire sauce. I have yet to find a brand of worcestershire sauce that DOESN'T contain sugar. If anyone knows of one, write it in the comments. Either way, I would have liked a recipe for that.

6) This one is just a personal rant maybe, but the breakfast section is pretty lame. The idea is great of having your frittata all made for you, but it lists 2 hours cook time. That is awkward for slow cookers. It's to short to set it the night before, and to long for when you get up in the morning. Especially when it takes you all of 20 minutes to just make it on the stove top. Where is the time savings? So it's transportable? Uhhh so is a 9x13 pan.

The recipes aren't that creative. Use TONS of premade spice blends. Not many things I haven't just thrown together with out a recipe in my crock pot (Spicy chicken wings? Wings+hot sauce. BRILLIANT! Never would have come up with that *dripping sarcasm*). I wanted to like it, but just don't. Nothing called my name that I had to make right then. Nothing struck me as a fresh take on paleo. Just pass.

53 of 54 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Must For Anybody That Follows The Paleo Diet! September 27, 2012

By Curious Goerge

Format:Paperback

One of the biggest complaints of eating Paleo is that it's expensive and it takes forever to prep/cook food. As someone that doesn't really enjoy cooking, or cleaning up afterwards, it's nice to have a resource that provides recipes that are both easy and delicious. In addition, Robb Wolf, author of Paleo Solution, offered some interesting insight as to why slow cooking is healthier than alternative cooking methods. As it turns out slow cooking is the healthiest way to cook food. In a nutshell (at least how I understood it) slow cooking helps preserve the nutrient content of vegetables and meat, and because everything is mixed together you actually you end up ingesting a lot of the nutrients that are typically lost with conventional cooking methods.

From the book: Robb Wolf - "Unlike baking or fry- ing, which necessitate relatively high temperatures (making those nasty polycyclic thingies), slow cooking occurs at reasonably low temperatures so that you don't see the wacky kitchen chemistry that is common with other approaches."

The recipes are broken up into 5-categories:Breakfast, Soups and Stews, Main Dishes, Side Dishes, and Desserts.

The breakfast recipes consist of frittata dishes, which are easy, fast (2-hours), and taste great (much better than when I attempt them in the oven). The soups and stews include both traditional and unique dishes (I particularly like the Jalapeno Sweet Potato Chowder and Coconut Cream of Broccoli Soup), and the main courses include heartier meals like Boneless Pork Ribs, Beef Brisket, and Yellow Curry Chicken. The side dishes are simple, but great because it gives you ideas of what to with the slow cooker meals that are quick and easy, which is the whole point of the book. Gower even tells you what sides go with certain main dishes. The desserts is just a bonus. I didn't even know you could make a desert in the crock-pot, especially ones that are paleo.

Overall, the book is as exactly what I wanted: slow cooker meals that I can prep in the morning and eat when I get home after work. I struggled to find good options online, so this book is a great resource for anybody that follows the Paleo diet!