Recipe: Creamy Slow-Cooker Peanut Chicken and Broccoli

The slow cooker and stir-fry might seem to live in different worlds — one slow, the other flash-fast — but sometimes you want the lively flavors of stir-fry without the last-minute prep and cooking. With a little planning, you can easily create a dish that replicates the goodness of a stir-fry with the help of the slow cooker.

Here, a rich, creamy peanut sauce, enlivened with scallions, ginger, garlic, and red curry paste, envelops tender, slow-cooked chunks of chicken and broccoli. Stir-fry, meet the slow cooker.

When choosing chicken for the slow cooker, we like to go with dark thigh meat, which offers good flavor and doesn’t dry out like white breast meat can. Choosing skinless, boneless chicken thighs makes prep especially easy.

The meat will become meltingly tender as it cooks for hours, so we make sure to cut it into large chunks (about six pieces per thigh) and avoid stirring it during cooking, which can break it up and cause it to shred.

A scattering of thinly sliced scallions and chopped roasted peanuts over top adds a bright punctuation to this wholesome, kicky dish.

We believe that the slow cooker is a tool that can help you eat well no matter your goals. With the start of the new year, we’re utilizing the slow cooker to create wholesome meals to nourish us from breakfast to dinner. In this series you’ll find recipes full of veggies and never short on flavor. It’s time to take advantage of all this workhorse appliance has to offer.