What's For Dinner??? (recipe for turkey quinoa taco bowls)

If  you're a mom, you know this is the first question out of your kid's mouths when they get home from school, or when you first get in the door from work. What's for dinner? It's exhausting sometimes trying to please all of the appetites in your household, while keeping things healthy, affordable, & time efficient. As I've mentioned before my crockpot is seriously my bestie, we go way back...she's always there to help me out, and just when I think I can't perk up one more day to cook another damn meal for everyone, she's shiny & optimistic and magically turns a few items I have on hand into a delicious meal! That being said, I usually like to plan out my week's meals as mentioned in my meal prep blog, but sometimes even the best laid plans get altered. I had planned to make Spaghetti & Meatballs on Wednesday, but I didn't get done with work over the lunch hour until later than planned and was missing a few ingredients. SO...plan B materialized in my head as I was driving home. I still wanted to use my crockpot because I knew it was a busy afternoon at work and I wouldn't feel like being on my feet afterwards to make dinner, & I had to take my son shopping for soccer cleats. Anyway, I gathered up some ingredients I had on hand and made the most of it, and you know what, that magic crockpot turned those ingredients into a healthy tasty dinner that everyone enjoyed!

Turkey Quinoa Taco Bowls

Ingredients:

2 lbs. Jennie-O ground turkey

1 pint cherry tomatoes- washed & chopped

1 can black beans (drained & rinsed)

1 cup quinoa- dry

1 handful fresh cilantro- washed & roughly chopped

1 TBSP cumin

2 tsp garlic powder

2 tsp onion powder

2 tsp minced dried onion

1 tsp chili powder

5 shakes of Frank's Red Hot sauce

1 tsp himalayan sea salt

2 tsp black pepper

2 limes- juiced

2 cups water

*2 sliced avocados- to add on top of your bowl when serving (optional)

Method:

Wash your produce and roughly chop it. Throw everything together in the crockpot, give it a stir, and cook on low for 5 hours. This turned out delicious. 

This is clearly before I stirred everything, because it was prettier like this :D 

If I had salsa on hand, or canned diced tomatoes I probably would've added those. However, the slow cooking method gives all of the ingredients a chance to cook & fuse together resulting in a much yummier robust flavor than just cooking this altogether on top of the stove, in my opinion. The other great thing about crock pot cooking...it's really tough to mess up. Honestly, you can take this basic recipe and add all kinds of things, corn, veggies, salsa, cheese, make it your own. I didn't take a picture of what it looked like when it was done, because we dug in & I forgot :/ But, another night of home cooked meals that please the crowd, so it was a win!

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