Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

UPDATE: I've recently tried 2 more recipes that are easy keepers. Creamy Tomato Soup on page 56 is rich, smooth and just plain comforting. Turkey Breast and Gravy produces tender, moist meat and delicious gravy. Be sure to check the meat with an instant read thermometer, you don't want to overcook it. Pair it with Green Bean Casserole from Slow Cooker Revolution Vol. 2 (also delicious) and you're halfway to Thanksgiving dinner. When I saw in the pre-release notes that this book had 400 recipes, I worried that it would simply be a compilation of the two Slow Cooker Revolution books, and there is plenty of overlap, as is usual with ATK books. By my rough count, 35-40% of the recipes are in one of the prior books. Some chapters contain a lot more new recipes than others. Take Dinner for Two, recipes that don't even appear in the first volume. Vol 2 has 18 recipes, only 5 of which are repeated here. So 22 of the 27 recipes in this chapter are brand new. For cooks like me, with a small family, that increases the value of this book, as it means less scaling of recipes designed for more people. The tips presented on pages 8-17 are very valuable, and may have you looking at your slow cooker in a whole new light. Cooking times have been tightened up so that most now have only a one-hour window instead of the 2 hours from the first book. Timing for chicken breasts has been reduced from 2-3 hours (SCR Vol 2) to 1-2 hours, which I think is spot on. Although it's physically larger than the SCR books, it is about the same thickness, with 388 pages. Instead of sticking to the one-recipe-per-page format of the previous volumes, there are 2-3 recipes per page, and some of the headnotes for recipes appear on the page before the recipe. But do not worry overmuch, there are no split ingredient lists, and most recipes do not span two pages. Some directions will require a page turn, but not many. There are a lot more photos than in the other ATK slow cooker books. There are also color blocks to indicate Easy/Fast Prep, Vegetarian, Light and Cook All Day recipes. These appear in the chapter ToC, the index and below the headnotes for each recipe. All in all, it's a pretty complete (as advertised) slow cooker cookbook. What most people would consider the essential recipes are duplicated from the previous books, so if you have those and are happy, this one isn't really necessary. But If you have been wondering which to get, I'd recommend this one for it's updated recipes. Having everything in one volume means you don't have to worry about chapter titles that don't track between books, as is the case with the first two books. I purchased this book at Sam's Club.