Donna Elick - The Simple Kitchen

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For Sierra,

You always give us something to look forward to and make every day thebest day ever.Your wonderful spirit inspires us and you fill our lives with love, laughter and sparkles!

Welcome to The Simple Kitchen! We are Donna and Chad Elick, the creators of the cooking website and blog The Slow Roasted Italian. Over the years, weve developed and photographed more than 1,000 recipes for the millions of readers who come to our site looking for tasty time-saving solutions. Weve learned how to turn recipes that traditionally take a long time to cook into quick and easy dishes that are bursting with flavor and made with as many real ingredients as possible.

Im Donna, the storyteller in the family. Allow me to guide you through our delicious recipes in this book; my amazing husband, Chad, will handle the show-and-tell with mouthwatering photography! As a young adult living on my own, I enjoyed cooking the meals that my mom taught me and found that it brought me great joy to feed people. Cooking for Chad for the first time, I proudly served him frozen chicken fried steak and boxed mashed potatoes. Thank goodness he stuck around after that. Lucky for Chad, it really worked out!

Its funny to think that the path to writing this book all started with a recipe that my mom shared with me years ago. One day, my mom called to tell me about a dessert she had had at work. She insisted I make it, and let me tell youthose pecan squares were amazing! Shortly after that, while flipping through the channels, I landed on Ina Garten making the same recipe that my mom had given me. I stopped, remembering how delicious they were. So, I watched and learned. Passion was ignited in me to get into the kitchen and try new things with Chad by my side coming up with delicious ideas.

Before long, our family and friends were asking for recipes for our newest creations. Chad and I decided to put them online, so everyone we knew could find them. In the summer of 2011, The Slow Roasted Italian was born. If you know anything about us, you know that Chad and I are like Frick and Frack, partners in love and life, and you cant find one of us without the other. Naturally, Chad was right there, camera in hand. He has an incredible knack for making our recipes look as delicious as they taste, dontchathink? Chad is the amazing photographer and designer for our popular website. Hes also the mastermind behind the food fusion recipes that we create for you. Hello, delicious!

After our daughter, Sierra, was born, everything in life changed. Making smarter food choices really became a priority. Plus, I wanted to spend time with my family, not in the kitchen cooking. So my love of all day cooking transformed into a passion for creating quick and easy recipes made with real ingredients that are full of flavor.

Our recipes are inspired by our lives, the places we have lived and the food we have enjoyed in our travels. We love to find ways to take a complicated recipe and make it simply, without sacrificing flavor. Our recipes taste so good that an hour later you are still thinking, Dang, that was some good food. I cant wait to eat it again!

Among our recipes, you will find Mexican flavors, like our and so much more.

We are absolutely giddy that you have picked up this book, and we look forward to hearing all about the delicious meals you have created! We have included more than 80 scrumptious recipes, with a handful of family favorites from our website that we just had to share with you. We hope that our recipes inspire you to cook simply and, of course, share!

Recipes that are so easy they just about cook themselves are an integral tool in our simple kitchen, so much so that the slow cooker recipes overflowed from this chapter into other sections. Be sure to look for more slow cooker recipes throughout the book. I have a bit of a slow cooker thing.

I really embraced my slow cooker after my daughter was born. All of a sudden, I found I wanted to spend less time in the kitchen and more time with my family. At the time, I had one small round slow cooker that I bought when I moved out on my own. Many years later, I now have eight of them. Obsess much? Yes! I am totally in love with the set it and forget it way of cooking. These recipes are so easy that we have tagged each one with how long the prep work takes, because the slow cooker does the rest of the work.

Our recipes are inspired by where we have lived and the food our families have experienced.

I grew up on the sandy beaches of a small town in southwest Florida, where the sun and the sand were everything. Southern food melted my heart, and in the end, it became a delicious influence in our kitchen and our recipes. Now we crave it! Our finger lickin good are Southern staples, and now they can be made right in your slow cooker.

Chad was born and raised in Americas Heartland. My meat-and-potato-loving husband is an Iowan through and through, so the really rocks his world!

When I was in my twenties I met the man of my dreams (yes, of course, it was Chad, silly!) and he lived across the country, so I loaded up the truck and moved to Phoenix Arizona, that is where I found an abundance of flavors that I had no idea existed, and now they are nearly a part of my DNA, such as our . Its a play on the ever-popular French dip with a delicious Mexican twist.

is quite possibly our daughters favorite recipe in this book. This recipe is so gratifying I literally broke out into my happy dance with a chorus of ummmms following behind me. Its rich and creamy, utterly cheesy and perfectly worthy of a special occasion!

This chapter wouldnt be complete without a recipe inspired by my Italian roots. We ate a lot of New Yorkstyle Italian food when I was growing up: lots of pasta and cheese. Obviously, the love of cheese really stuck. Three-Cheese Meat Lasagna is our favorite lasagna ever, and its going to light up your palate ().

So, what are you waiting for? Grab your slow cooker and lets get cookin.