Seasoned Cooking: 16 November 2012 Announcements

A trio of flavor superstars come together to inspire a wonderful autumn-focused dessert that could easily star in your Thanksgiving dessert. But why wait that long! After all, you'll want to test it, right?

If you think working overtime, skipping your lunch hour and staying chained to your desk will make you more productive, you need to cut yourself some slack and take a break. Get insight into what skipping breaks can do to your health and productivity and find a fantastic totable lunch wrap recipe that will leave you with no excuse to skip lunch.

With some of the coldest weather of the year on its way, it's time to pay a bit of homage to the incredible kitchen tool that is the crockpot. A pile of great recipes for your slow cooker await you this week. We begin with a chili recipe that's packed with lots of healthy vegetables and legumes and really packs a flavor punch!

Continuing our ode to slow cooking, we're taking on one of my favorite ethnic dishes of all time: carnitas. Carnitas are a Mexican specialty of seasoned pulled pork, traditionally fried in lard, with a pleasing mixture of tender and crispy browned parts. This simplified recipe avoids the deep-frying step, and takes advantage of the slow cooker's ability to produce very tender meat and pairs it with a quick trip under the broiler to produce the tender, caramelized meat that typifies proper carnitas.

The final installment in our ode to slow cookers brings us to something crockpots are great for: making soup. This time around, everything from potatoes to dried beans to kale find their way into a creamy soup that's the epitome of the chilly season before us.