Book excerpt: The Crock-Pot Ladies Big Book of Slow Cooker Dinners is a lifetime of delicious dinner ideas that are as easy to make as they are flavorful. The Crock-Pot Ladies walk the walk of raising busy families and feeding them well. Meet Heidi, Katie, and Sarah, three awesome cooks who preside over households that together include ten children along with a variety of husbands, grandchildren, and other relatives—all while they maintain super-busy work-at-home schedules that fill most of each day. The hundreds of thousands of readers of their wildly popular website, Crock-Pot Ladies, rely on them for nutritious and tasty recipes that deliver variety over monotony, comfort over pretense, and, above all, quick prep work over laboriously fancy productions. In this book, their first, featuring 275 recipes—over half of which are brand new and not available on their website—the Crock-Pot Ladies use easy-to-shop-for, available-anywhere ingredients to build terrific soups and stews, dips and spreads, sides and casseroles, and, especially, protein-packed main courses for big appetites. Experts at cooking for the freezer, the Ladies serve up 25 freezer meal plans, covering 5-, 7-, and 10-day plans, that use the many freezer-friendly recipes in the book. Nobody knows Crock-Pots and other slow cookers like the Crock-Pot Ladies, and The Crock-Pot Ladies Big Book of Slow Cooker Dinners is chock-full of tips and tricks that show you how to get the most from any model or size of slow cooker. This is a book you can rely on, day in and day out, weekdays and weekends, for fabulous dinners that don't demand time that you don't have.