Book excerpt: Healthy meals made the slow cooker way America's Test Kitchen had a simple goal: Create quick and easy foolproof slow cooker recipes that taste as good as meals prepared on the stovetop or in the oven. They had one more stipulation: They wanted their selections to be healthy, not the fat-heavy main courses featured in many slow cooker cookbooks. It took nearly a year of testing, 1,500 recipes, and $20,000 spent on groceries to find the finalists: 200 new, easy-to-make slow cooker recipes. True to its trusted source, the winning recipes collected here include delicious weekday and holiday meals; snacks, sides, and desserts.