This Slow Cooker Creamy Chicken and Wild Rice Soup will be the star of your winter cuisine! Perfect for chilly days.

You guys. Fall has officially arrived.

I’m no longer rolling up my skinny jeans.

I wore a scarf.

We turned on our heat.

I got out my slippers.

I haven’t worn a real coat yet, but it won’t be long.

I’ve been using my slow cooker more than I care to admit. But I use that baby all year. In the winter, it creates irresistible comfort foods. In the summer, it cooks dinner without heating up your house. Winner, winner, chicken slow cooker dinner.

Speaking of chicken slow cooker dinners (see what I did there?), I’m excited to share another recipe with you that’s part of my partnership with Just BARE^® Chicken.

This slow cooker soup really couldn’t be easier to make. You just throw all the ingredients (except the cream) into the slow cooker and let it work its magic. Six to eight hours later, you have creamy delicious soup. The rice is tender and the chicken is ready to be shredded.

Just BARE antibiotic-free chicken is hand-trimmed so you don’t even have to bother with trimming fat off the chicken thighs – it is already done for you. All you need to do is sit and take in the great smells of this cooking all day in your house. Perfect for football Saturdays, Sunday night dinners or busy weeknight meals when you want to come home to a hot meal already made. It’s basically the perfect soup.

I like Just BARE’s boneless skinless chicken thighs in this soup because they have a lot of really great flavor – but if you’re not a dark meat fan, feel free to use boneless skinless chicken breasts in this recipe.

Enjoy – and stay warm!

Slow Cooker Creamy Chicken and Wild Rice Soup

Ingredients:

Directions:

Creamy Sweet Potato and Roasted Red Pepper Hummus- a unique, nutritious appetizer for holiday parties or a healthy snack. 

Have I told you how much I love hummus? I seriously eat it almost everyday. I’m always looking for new recipes and new ways to make it, and since the air is crisp and it’s feeling all fall-like, a sweet potato hummus seemed the way to go. This one has a secret ingredient- curry! That’s not to say that this dish tastes “curry-ish”. The curry just gives it a distinctive flavor that will have your guests wondering what makes it so good.

To begin, preheat your oven to 400 degrees. Cover a baking sheet with parchment paper. Lay the 2 sweet potatoes on the parchment paper and place in a 400 degree oven. Note: Sweet potatoes technically have 2 layers of skin. For this recipe, you remove the first layer and leave the bottom layer of skin on.  The other option is to leave them completely unpeeled and then remove the skins before putting them in the food processor. I prefer to peel only the outside skin and then throw them in (with a thin layer of skin still on them). I like the texture it gives to the hummus, but it’s good either way. 

After 15 minutes of baking, remove the baking sheet from the oven, add the red pepper strips and put back in the oven for 30 minutes.

The sweet potatoes should be soft and the red peppers should be browned. Remove from the oven and set aside to cool.

In a food processor or high powered blender, add the chickpeas, sweet potatoes, red pepper, tahini, olive oil, lemon juice, salt, black pepper, curry powder and cayenne powder. Process until smooth.

Serve the hummus with pita bread, apple chips (yum!), carrots, etc.

*Serving size is 2 tablespoons.

Sometimes I put a lot of thought into the recipes I feature on this website, going to the trouble of researching the current trends to analyzing the most popular google searches for the season. The whole ordeal involves a lot of spreadsheets, sticky notes, and math – you know, all the those necessary evils of the corporate world.

But the rest of the time? What I make depends on what food I find on mega discount at my local grocery store. For instance, my place to grocery shop typically has a few fold out tables near the back where they place hot clearance items or (here’s the really good part) any food they need to move quickly. And the food isn’t expired or damaged or anything bad – it’s just that for one reason or another, they just need it gone ASAP and they’re willing to sell it practically at cost in order to do it.

So you can imagine my excitement when I rounded the corner and saw not only were the discount tables fully stocked, but they were absolutely overflowing with Delallo products. Delallo is one of the brands I look out for when I’m searching for Italian food, from gnocchi, pizza sauce, lady fingers – you name it. They cover all the bases of comfort food and I was simply beside myself when I saw that all their products were marked down nearly 75% off. I have no idea how I got so lucky, but I ended up buying just about four of each of my favorites.

And in that awesome food haul? Sun dried tomatoes. It wound up being the perfect inspiration for this dish – so much so that I had enough foresight to buy all the other ingredients to make it that day in the store. Because, seriously, this almost never happens for me. Typically I have to make multiple trips to the grocery store between all the spreadsheets and math before I have everything I need to start cooking.

It certainly helped that I had been craving stuffed pasta shells for the past few weeks, and anything with a lasagna theme would help me get my ricotta fix. I also debated going the more traditional route of using ground beef for this dish, but I just couldn’t seem to shake the fact that sun dried tomatoes needed chicken. Sun dried tomatoes just need chicken, ya know?

Overall, this dish was just as good as I imagined (and just as comfort-educing as all the other meals I make with Delallo products). It was also still just as perfect and as flavorful when I heated it up for lunch the next day. This will definitely be a repeat recipe in our house!

I'm totally hooked on this new make your own fruit leather/fruit roll-up fad.

For those of you who don't know me, I'm a firm believer that the Vitamix is one of the best kitchen inventions of all time (this isn't a sponsored post btw).

Whole food smoothies, soups, sauces and ice creams are all at the tips of your fingers with one of those bad boys.

But until this summer it never occurred to me to bake the fruit I blended.

So now I'm bringing you my favorite fruit roll-up flavor combo: Blueberry Peach. FYI, you can substitute frozen, thawed fruit and the recipe will work just fine. Just be prepared to get a slight decrease in flavor.

Made with whole fruits and a dash of honey and lemon juice, it's definitely a snack you can feel good about. 

Recipe

Makes 8

Ingredients

Instructions

Cabbage Rolls are something I’ve always wanted to try, but never quite got around to making. When I was recently invited to a fall potluck at a friend’s house and learned that one invitee couldn’t eat gluten, I decided to experiment and make them with quinoa!

Obviously with that healthier step taken, I couldn’t resist using ground chicken as the main protein instead of the higher calorie ground beef. The result, though quite unusual for cabbage rolls, was a tasty, much healthier version of everyone’s favourite fall comfort food dish!

These Healthier Napa Cabbage Rolls are baked in the oven with a simple, homemade tomato sauce, and are a rich, satisfying meal perfect for family gatherings, potlucks and more.

I used Napa cabbage because I’ve heard it’s easier to roll since it is more delicate, but that’s also something you should watch out for: make sure that you aren’t cooking the cabbage for too long or the leaves will fall apart. Just a couple of seconds submerged in boiling water then in ice water should do the trick!

After you soften the cabbage leaves, you’ll put the chicken and quinoa mixture in each leaf and roll it up, placing in a large oven safe casserole dish. The trick to amazing homemade tomato sauce believe it or not is brown sugar! Add a pinch to your crushed tomatoes along with some shallots and sautéed garlic, and you’ve got one hell of a sauce!

Will you be trying these Healthier Napa Cabbage Rolls?

These Healthy Salted Caramel Brownies are made with a coconut oil base, making them flourless, and they’re only 9 ingredients! Drizzled with healthier salted caramel, making these brownies both salty and sweet. 

You knew it was coming. Anytime a blogger posts a recipe for salted caramel, you know there’s going to be other recipes incorporating that caramel to follow. It’s inevitable, but the best kind of inevitable. 

These brownies are… .well, they’re a lot of things. They’re an automatic mood lifter, a sweet tooth fixer, moist (hate that word but true), and the chocolate-iest of them all while still being healthy. Oh, and they ARE as good as they look. 

Can we just agree that anything dessert-related is automatically better when drizzled withsalted caramel? It’s true. Growing up, my mom was the baking queen of America (Ok she still is). Sometimes, my brother and I would come home from school and we’d have TWO different desserts to choose from, i.e. cake AND cookies. ….so spoiled… When she’d ask us what we wanted, my brother always requested brownies, while I much preferred cookies. So much so, that when my mom would get done making the brownies I wouldn’t even get off the couch to eat them while they were still warm and gooey. Like, zero excitement. I know—wtf was wrong with me? I have no idea. They’re BROWNIES for goodness sake. It doesn’t really matter what kind, brownies in general are just delicious. 

These brownies in particular are made with a coconut oil base, making them flourless, and then they’re drizzled—or perhaps drenched—in my healthier salted caramel sauce. Talk about a wining combination, if I do say so myself. 

So, what do you need for these brownies? Nine ingredients not including the salted caramel, but I’m just going to assume you already have some on hand. I mean, you definitely should. And by that I mean stop what you’re doing and GO MAKE SOME and try not to eat it all by the spoonful. Then come back and make these brownies and drizzle whatever little caramel you have left overtop and give them to your friends and expect a lot of love to you from them. I’m not a psychic but… they’re BROWNIES. 

This Halloween popcorn pops recipe is perfect for Halloween parties and events, and easier to make than you’d think! Kids and adults will love eating their sweet, pumpkin-spiced popcorn off of a stick!

Popcorn, popcorn, popcorn. Can you believe I’ve pretty much only been eating it out of a bowl? Well, I’d say it’s due time to put it on a stick and eat it like a lollipop, right? Popcorn and I go way back – to Sunday night TV nights with my family – but the truth is, it’s an extremely versatile treat.
We’ve done savory popcorn with Cool Ranch popcorn and we’ve done fruity with orange creamsicle popcorn. We are now well into fall (I still cannot believe it!) andHalloween is rapidly approaching. I’m sure you all have parties, school events, or gatherings where you need to bring a treat along with you! These pumpkin spice popcorn pops are the perfect thing.
Kids love anything on a stick… and let’s face it, adults kinda do too. And anything pumpkin spice is alllll the rage.
My popcorn pops are flavored with pumpkin spice and held together by sweet, meltedCampfire® Marshmallows. They have a lot of fun Halloween marshmallows available like the super fun Scary Berry Campfire® Marshmallows, but for this recipe I stuck with the classic Mini Marshmallows.
I always keep a bag on hand! They melt down perfectly to coat the popcorn and hold these cute little pops together. Your guests will be able to eat them off the stick andkeep their hands from getting sticky.
Other than the marshmallows, for this recipe I used my homemade pumpkin pie spice, these fun lollipop sticks, and of course my trusty air popper. I also used candy melts to decorate them along with some fun Halloween sprinkles – because I can never resist picking up sprinkles at the grocery store! I rolled some in orange sugar and kept those simple – but I think they are my favorites.
You can have fun with this recipe and do it any way you want. Get creative and make them look like pumpkins! Get the kids involved in decorating. The sky is the limit!