Vegan Slow Cooking for Two or Just for You: More Than 100 Delicious One-Pot Meals for Your 1.5-Quart or 1.5-Litre Slow Cooker

by Kathy Hester, Kate Lewis (Photographer)

If you have a small family or are looking for better-portioned vegan meals (that don't force you to eat chili for a week straight!), "Vegan Slow Cooking for Two or Just for You "is the perfect resource for you. Featuring recipes geared specifically for use with a 1.5- to 2-quart slow cooker, you'll find endless meal ideas that you can make with minimal effort and maximum taste. Just prep a few items the night before or morning of, and come home to a hot meal-or side, or dessert-the moment you walk in the door!The little slow cooker is so easy to use that it makes cooking everyday a snap, so you can have a healthy variety of foods at a fraction of the cost of eating out. Inside, you'll find a whole new world of food to fall in love with, from breakfast-y "Pumpkin Polenta "to comforting "White Bean Quinoa Gumbo "to luscious "Blueberry Lemon Cake." You'll be amazed at what your little slow cooker can do!

Genres: Cookbooks, Food, Cooking, Nonfiction, Vegan, Reference, Food and Drink

178 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Kathy Hester lives in Durham, NC with her two cats who would rather not live together, a cute dog with a belly rub addiction, her very own picky eater, a kitchen garden, and more slow cookers than one person should own.

She blogs at healthyslowcooking.com & plantbasedinstantpot.com

Reviews

[Angeline]

I was so excited to discover this book! As the only vegetarian in the house, often I'm the only one eating the massive batch of food I've made in my slow cooker. After day four, I'm looking for change of taste.

This book has such a variety of recipes! From blueberry coffee creamer, french toast, gumbo, curries, desserts and sandwiches!! I furiously bookmarked all the recipes I could not wait to try.

The book starts out with staple recipes such as vegetable bouillon and vegetarian crumbles. I made the small batch beans a few times. The beans came out perfect each time in my little slow cooker. I made batches of chickpeas, black beans, and small red beans.

My favorite recipes are the Pumpkin Caramel Breakfast Barley, Carrot Cake Rice Pudding, Lentil Quinoa Taco Filling, Creamy Navratan Korma, Green Beans in Black Bean Sauce with Tofu, and the New Orleans Rice and Beans.

I was really excited to try the Tofu Braised with Pears and Brussels Sprouts, but it overcooked.

It took me a few tries to figure out the right time for my slow cooker. Most of the recipes suggest "overnight" or "during the day" which is between 7 to 9 hours. I found most of my recipes were ready by 7 hours. If I pushed it further they were mushy and blah.

[Max]

Great recipes, very useful! Nice pictures and easy to follow.

[Jen]

Kathy Hester is becoming one of my favorite bloggers. I just put her vegan air fryer book on hold and can't wait to read that one as well. The Vegan Slow Cooking book is refreshing in that it uses a lot of flavor combinations you might not normally come up with on your own, and also a large variety of grains and applications for the slow cooker that I haven't used before.

[Nancy]

I won this book through Goodreads First reads. This is a beautifully set up easy to follow cookbook. The photographs are gorgeous. It offers did you know, recipe variations, and serving size information which is very helpful. I'm not a big meat eater myself but I really entered this giveaway for new ideas for my daughter who follows this diet. I'm always worried she's not eating right. I know we are going to have a great time trying these recipes out in the slow cooker. I will update here soon of our favorites we try. : )

Today we tried the "Cheesy Butternut Squash Macaroni". This was good and I had the nutritional yeast flakes already and was happy to have another way to use them. I used silk PureAlmond unsweetened in this which I did have to add more because of the thickening which it suggested if this happened. I might try a different pasta next time because the one I used didn't hold up well.

[Amanda Knox]

This cookbook has some interesting recipes that are well worth checking out. Unfortunately, I have a very large crockpot so I have not made any of the recipes. I will try one or two of them in a pot on the stove. I will circle back to this one when I have access to the appropriate tools (or an excessive number of people to warrant a quadruple batch).

[Aimee Dars]

I hate cooking, so thought that finding some slow cooker recipes might be a good solution, and since it's just George and me, the small serving sizes of Vegan Slow Cooking for Two or Just for You fit.

The cookbook opens with an introduction to using a slow cooker: useful to me because I have never even turned one on before. It includes sections on breakfast food, sauces, soups and stews, heartier fare, and even some entire meals. The recipes are diverse, including Indian, Ethiopian, and Italian inspired dishes. Hester includes tips for substitutions, keeping in mind that some readers will be members of a CSA, something I haven't seen in a cookbook before but is an interesting addition.

I am a hard audience for cookbooks because not only do I hate to cook or be in the kitchen, I am also a notoriously picky eater. I like simple dishes without many ingredients. About half the recipes in Vegan Slow Cooking for Two or Just for You passed my initial perusal. Some of those had more prep time than I'm likely to spend, but there are a number that I plan to try.

The ingredients used generally seem to be easy to find, and the instructions clear. I wish there had been more photographs, though; not every recipe had one, and I prefer seeing the finished dishes.

...aka darzy... | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram

[CTEP]

1.) Vegan Slow Cooking For Two or Just For you is a wonderful resource for meal planning on a budget. There are over one hundred meal recipes for your 1.5-quart or 1.5 Liter slow cooker. The first chapter is particularly helpful because it gives an introduction to using your slow cooker, menu planning tips, a guild to vegan ingredients and tips for using your freezer. The rest of the chapters are organized by recipe type and the second chapter goes into more advice about meal planning on a budget.

2.) The book has been helpful to me in my service because I have used it to make great meals on a limited budget. The recipes are easy to follow and usually the only preparation is throwing all the ingredients into the slow cooker and letting it cook for a few hours. I particularly have enjoyed the recipes in the soup section and look forward to making a few of them. Chapter seven features a vegan recipe for taco filling that looks really awesome and is easy to make.

3.) I would recommend this book to anyone doing a service year with AmeriCorps because the recipes are inexpensive and healthy. The preparation and cooking are easy and can be done with little work. I like to try new foods and this book has definitely introduced me to several new ingredients to use in cooking. There is a whole chapter on healthy deserts that will amaze you!

[MD]

Ok, so I wasn’t *exactly* the target audience for this book. I want to eat more vegetables and I recently got a (large) slow cooker. This seemed to match the vegetable part at least.

I don’t enjoy cooking, hence the slow cooker. But apparently there are people who like to cook completely from scratch and use slow cookers to do it. My preference is five ingredients or fewer and not too esoteric please. But I found several recipes here I am pretty confident I can adapt for my much larger slow cooker and for substituting premade spice mixes, using precut or frozen vegetables, etc. For example, I plan to try the apple chai oat groats but I will substitute chai tea mix for the 6 spices listed in the recipe. So far I’ve made a double batch of the Ahead-of-the-Game Big Batch of Cooked Onions to which I added some commercial ramen broth to make a tasty French onion soup and a couple other things.

I do wish there was a brief section on adapting the recipes for larger slow cookers, but it looks like maybe she has a separate recipe book for larger slow cookers.

[Melissa Lee-Tammeus]

A very nice, easy to follow cookbook with hefty pages, lots of colored photos and ingredients that are easily found in the standard grocery store. Definitely think I will feel healthy after utilizing this. Plus, the whole idea of "add everything to crock pot and let sit" is exactly what I hoped for in a crock pot cookbook - no major preps here.

[Lesli]

I'm probably the wrong person for this book. I don't see the point in slow cooking vegetables, tofu, tempeh, etc. I cannot imagine that any of these recipes would have much flavor or texture. Also, not enough photos and too many unicorn-y ingredients. If this was Vegan Cooking for Two, I'd be more interested in trying any of the recipes.

[Elaine]

Good basic cookbook

Good variety, lots of beans and Indian food. Harder to find ingredients usually have an alternative option. Minimal chopping and prep work.

[Hazel Leu]

Interesting vegan recipes.

[Cherie]

Not my kind of book - I generally love to cook in massive portions (even if just for me bc HELLO FREEZER AND LEFTOVERS). But she's a great cookbook author so some neat ideas anyway.

[Angie Kennedy]

There were just a few recipes I thought would be useful, but I am very interested in trying the make-your-own gluten crumbles.

[Ann]

The visual design of this book was very distracting. There needed to be more pictures of dishes. I really wanted to like this but found it confusing.

[Monica Emerson]

delicious recipies, well presented

[Mskychick]

I found one recipe I wanted to make: Italian “sausage”

[Jenn]

Some good recipes. Many I can’t use because of mushroom allergy or because she uses straight up gluten.

[Mark]

:: :: Significanly revised :: ::

Is for 1.5 quart/liter slow cookers; ours is 3.5. While I'm not saying some of these don't sound good I doubt I'll be making Pear Rose Cardmom Oatmeal or Chocolate Pumpkin Brownie Breakfast Quinoa or Winter-Spiced Butternut Squash Pecan French Toast. Not in the slow cooker or probably at all.

Not for me.

:: :: Above 19 January 2015 Skimmed :: ::

15 January 2016 Sara asked me to look this over yesterday and I ended up writing down a bunch of recipes, um, including that Chocolate Pumpkin ... one. I was wondering while I was reading it last night whether that was just some crazy late evening approval of something I would wake up to and be disgusted by the idea of. Or maybe I'm just getting a little more liberal in my imagining of porridge.

Againi, I found lots of possibilities but no idea if keepers. We have been having some issues with assorted recipes we've been trying lately as in they taste like crap or have bad textures or both.

The other issue which I need to go revisit is how many of these do I want for the recipe but will need to scale up for the larger slow cooker? There were some of the recipes which seemed to make sense in the one-two person size but we also do a lot of this to have leftovers so ....

Anyway, I have potentially revised my opinion significantly on this one.

[Lara]

I've been wondering for years whether I should figure out how to cook stuff in a slow cooker, mainly because I'm totally lazy and it sounds kind of easy. But reading this book made me realize that...maybe slow cooker food is not really my thing. Or maybe the recipes in here just look kind of uninteresting to me. Minestrone soup? Blah. Or too fancy. I mean, some of the oatmeals actually look really good, but seriously, Vanilla Fig Oatmeal Topped with Baklava Topping sounds delicious, but do I really need that for breakfast on a weekday? And if it's a weekend, I'd probably be more interested in NOT EATING OATMEAL for breakfast. And maybe that's it, that the things I don't care that much about seem too dressed up in this book, and the things I do care about seem too dressed down. Anyway, it did not even remotely inspire me to pull my multi-cooker out and see if I could actually use it for slow cooking purposes (this is how lazy I am--I have been thinking about pulling it out and looking into whether I can use it like this for like, five years now).

I can see this being great if you're a slow cooking pro transitioning to veganism (Is that a word? it sounds kinda dirty!) though, I guess.

[Jo * Smut-Dickted *]

I've tried a few recipes here and a couple were o.k. The mac and cheese one was not and neither my daughter or I liked it at all. I have noticed that the smaller slow cooker's must cook differently and the food tastes different. I just don't find it as flavorfull as if I use the stovetop or oven. It works very well for beans and soups - and that's where the successes have been so far for us. I'm torn between a 2 and a 3. I'd probably say 2.5 overall but I rounded up because I think some of the combo's are really easy to tweak and it got me to get a smaller cooker which will be very helpful for several specific things - esp. because I have limited space in a small townhouse.

I am really enjoying one of the author's other books and the food in that one tastes excellent - it's also very creative and has wonderful instructions for beans. It's called The Great Vegan Bean Book and I'm going to make a few more recipes before reviewing..but so far it's been very solid!

[Katey]

One of the problems with making slow cooker recipes is that if you're cooking for only yourself and perhaps one other person, there can be too much leftover. So I love the concept behind this book. However, I rely on leftovers from the meals I prepare, so I actually found myself doubling the recipes, and it still leaves very little leftover. Which for certain things is fine, but personally, there's nothing I love more than making a delicious soup or stew and then obsessively eating it for the next few days. But that's me. I love soup.

A good variety of different recipes and unlike a lot of slow cooker recipe books, most of them are indeed main entree fare (which is to say, you have all nutritional requirements in one meal), and anything lacking like more vegetables or protein can be easily added in to the recipes. I also like that is makes good use of tempeh and not just seitan, and is accomodating to gluten free needs.

[Gail]

I really wanted to like this book. I bought the cookbook and the small slow cooker to experiment with small-batch vegan slow cooking. I have tried several recipes in here and they were all utterly tasteless. A friend has been cooking from it as well, and we've shared our results. All terrible. I have no idea how these books get such good reviews. I've decided that the people who use them have all lost their sense of taste, or never knew what excellent food tasted like before they switched to a vegan diet.

A slow cooker is likely a great way to cook dried beans, something I'm going to try to do next. But the minute you add vegetable and spices, the result becomes terrible. Long cook times leach all the flavor from those ingredients, leaving you with tasteless much.

I do not recommend this book.

[Deanna]

Perfect book for our household of two omnivores aspiring to consume fewer animal products. Designed for a 1.5 quart cooker, these recipes don't leave too much in the way of leftovers and none of the recipes require a lot of cooking outside the slow cooker itself. We've tried just one recipe since we've had the book only a few days. I loved it, my daughter not so much, but no big deal as there were barely any leftovers. On to the next experiment. I will be willing to try almost all the recipes secure in the knowledge that we won't be stuck with huge batches of food that's not so appealing. I might buy a second small slow cooker so we can have multiple things on the go. I'm also intrigued by the "layered" recipes that turn out a complete meal with separate veggies and meat-like dishes.

[LemontreeLime]

I'm a gluten-free omnivore with vegetarian leanings, and I was talked into reading this by a complete non-vegan, and that alone should be statement enough at how good this book of recipes is. There are some great ideas in here to try, and all with the smaller crock-pot so you wont have to be eating the same recipe for a solid two weeks in a row. Unless of course, you want to. And there are some recipes in here that may inspire that level of devotion. All in all, an excellent addition to the field of vegan cookbooks. Nice work again, Ms. Hester!

[Glenda]

I got this great book from the San Antonio Public Library (twice already) and I think that I will probably have to break down and purchase a copy. Good illustrations. The author incorporates some ingredients that are interesting, but may not be available at the local supermarket, then also gives some more mainstream substitutions which I appreciated.

The Pear Chickpea Fall Stew (pg. 90) was a big hit at my house and introduced us to golden beets.

[Naomi]

Vegan Slow Cooking is a cookbook full of diverse and healthy recipes which seem inspirational and tasty. The recipes found in the cookbook can easily be used by non-vegans for hands off cooking for Meatless Monday’s and finding new ways to include more vegetables in ones diet. The best part is the recipes really only prepare two servings, minimizing too many leftovers. Do watch cook times, because the pasta recipe we tried had great flavor, but the noodles were mush.

[Carole]

A little disappointing. Many of the recipes were - "why would I do this in a slow cooker?" Others called for too many ingredients (particularly spices) that are not usually in one's pantry so you would end up spending a lot of money for 1 particular dish. But there were some recipes that make this book worth your time, so please don't overlook it entirely...just don't expect too much, as I did.

[Kevin]

I decided to read this before buying a slow cooker, and I'm glad I did. While some of the recipes are tempting, I'm pretty sure I can there equivalents that can be cooked on the stove top or in the oven and save myself from getting yet another kitchen gadget. I'm most interested in the soup and stew recipes and they should do well on the stove.

[Jaq]

I love my slow cooker, so I'm always looking for recipe books that allow me to explore the vegan side to my nature. Hester doesn't disappoint. This collection is tasty and healthy - all wrapped up in a vegan bow.

Loved how simple the recipes were and how easy to read and thereby cook with the recipes were written.