Ok, I’ll admit it. I’m lazy….sometimes. Some mornings I don’t want to get out of bed. I despise cleaning and sometimes let my dishes pile up. My husband shares my hate for dishwashing so there are days when we have a stand off to see who will clean them first. Those are usually the days when I don’t want to care about the dishes in the sink, but my secret cleaning OCD kicks in and I go on a very random rampage cleaning everything in sight.

My laziness comes in spurts.

When it comes to cooking, if there are too many ingredients or steps in a recipe then I pass. This busy moms gets distracted easily and a recipe with a gazillion ingredients simply won’t cut it. Hence the fact that many of my recipes are titled, 2-Ingredient This, 3-Ingredient That.

I also hate doing a lot of work for a recipe. If there 2 ingredients, but 1 involves seeding, peeling, poking, punching, baking, staking, grilling, patting, kneading, and THEN you can use it…I’m not interested. One of the ingredients that I’ve always considered high maintenance would be shrimp. I don’t really like to cook with cooked shrimp because I usually get it too rubbery. And raw shrimp has always seemed like too much work. Until recently that is.

I decided to pick up a bag of medium raw shrimp a few months ago because it’s low calorie and something that everyone in my family likes. Since then, I’ve made a variety of meals with shrimp. And you know what? The labor of peeling and shelling them hasn’t killed me! In fact, I love them now. They cook extremely quick no matter what method you use and they don’t need prior thawing. I’m notorious for forgetting to thaw out meat the night before.

One of my recent and most favorite shrimp dishes was this Crockpot Shrimp Creole. I originally found this at Food.com, but it’s actually a Paula Deen recipe. It was amazing! Definitely makes the peeling and shelling worth it.

I made this while my husband’s parents were here and while we shopped all day. It’s so nice to come home and have dinner waiting, isn’t it? I hope you get a chance to make this and please tell me what you think!

I did adapt this recipe a bit. I added a little water to create more juice to pour over my rice. I also omitted hot sauce. We aren’t very spicy around here.

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I’ve been leaning on my crockpot the last few weeks. Soccer games, school events, church events, life is busy. It’s so nice to have a little appliance that does the hard work for you, isn’t it?

We were planning a trip to the park for dinner last week and I knew it was going to be a busy day. On the menu for our picnic was either going to be peanut butter and jelly or lunch meat sandwiches which are necessarily a bad choice, but are quite possibly a little lame. And sure we could have stopped by Subway and gotten $5 subs, but to be honest I’m a cheapo and didn’t want to spend the money. So when picking up groceries that week I grabbed some hoagie rolls so that we could make up our own subs.

It wasn’t until the day of the park outing that I got the bright idea to put these in the crockpot. On my cooking journey, I’m learning that just about anything can be put in a crockpot. So why the heck not place some yummy subs in the crockpot to cook away all day and get toasty, warm, and gooey?

I started out by making up everybody’s sub their way. Mine consisted of a lot of good stuff like chicken breast, turkey, beef, cucumbers, onions, and more. And my daughter’s had just the meat and no cheese or anything else. This is one reason that I absolutely loved this idea. Each person can have whatever they want and yet they all cook at the same time.

I placed some balls of aluminum foil in the bottom of the crockpot to avoid any burning. I think it’s best to keep them in the middle and away from the sides as well. They have a better chance at cooking evenly this way.

Here’s what they looked like in all of their foil splendor. At this point I was just crossing my fingers that when I went to remove them they wouldn’t be charred balls of mush. Hey, I’ve never done this before. I did my best not to look at them throughout the day and managed to only peek once. Only to find out that they were doing just fine.

To my surprise, when it was time to leave for the picnic I popped them out and they were everything I’d imaged. Warm, gooey (cheese), browned, a little bit toasty, the onions were softened, and they looked fabulous. These will now always be favorite picnic food! I love that this is so versatile and you can change it up however you please.

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With busy nights, there are at least 3 nights per week that I plan on making a crockpot meal. I usually try to think of nights like soccer practice or small group when I know I’m not going to have time to cook up a big meal. My crockpot is like my best friend. It really does bring joy and happiness to my life. (Insert mushy crockpot love song here)

Take Easter for instance. We didn’t have a single plan (for once in our life). However, I was not about to spend the entire day cooking a meal. We really wanted to spend the day together enjoying each other’s company. Once again my crockpot stepped in to make life easy. I popped an entire chicken into it stuffed with rosemary and garlic and just let it go. 6 hours later after we were done playing outside, watching a little TV, and essentially getting a little tired of each other (what? doesn’t everybody?), the chicken was perfectly cooked and ready for our Easter dinner.

These porkchops are one of my new favorites for crockpot recipes! Only 3 ingredients and they are simply to most moist and tasty porkchops I might have ever had. No exaggeration.

I’m so thankful to have come across this recipe at Living Laughing and Loving!

You simply MUST try it!

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