I love a slow cooker.

You can make so many easy to prepare meals that are damn tasty.

Cheesy Brat Stew

There are no phases in this one because this one is a true drop, go, come home and eat recipe.

6 Bratwurst links browned and cut into 1/2 inch slices.
4 Medium Russet Potatoes peeled and cubed.
1 Small Sweet Onion peeled and chopped (more on sweet onions later)
1 Can of French Cut Green Beans (Drained)
1 Small to Medium Red Bell Pepper seeded and chopped.
1 Carrot sliced thin
2 Cups Shredded Cheddar Cheese
1 can Cream of Mushroom Soup
2/3 cup water.

Drop it all in to a slow cooker, set to medium and cook it for three hours or until the potatoes are fork-tender.

Yup. It's that simple. Drop it, cook it, serve it, eat it. We tried it this past weekend and It didn't need anything else. It was hearty, filling and just damn tasty. A lot of our recipes are evolved concoctions. We take the original recipe and say "Ooh! It needs..." or "Hrm...there's too much..." and we'll tweak it for the next go around. Eventually (like the previously mentioned Potato Soup) we get it to the point where we're happy with it and call it a recipe for the book.

This time we were totally happy with it straight off the page and into the soup pot.

Sweet onions. So far I've failed to see a point in buying plain yellow onions. They're very strong, they're pungent, and there is nothing that they can do that a sweet onion can do better. White onions have their place, Red Onions are the go to onion for salads and sandwiches...but when you're talking soups, stews, or even fried into onion rings or your own "bloomin' onion"...a sweet will just be that much more awesome.

Largely because they lack the high amount of sulfur compounds and have a higher water content than the yellows.

And it doesn't matter (much) which ones you get. Texas, Sweetie Sweets, Vidalias...they're pretty much the same and equally do a good job.  The nice thing is with so many varieties, we can get them year 'round.

With the bell pepper, a lot of people avoid them because they hear Red Pepper and think "Hotter than balls!" thanks to the other red pepper (the chili pepper) and avoid it. That couldn't get much further from the truth if you tried.

Red Bell peppers are simply the more mature form of the Green Bell Pepper. The greens are at their earliest stages of being ripe and so are less sweet and a little more bitter than the Orange and the Red varieties. As they develop their color, they lose a lot of the bitter and store more sugar for the seeds.

Also Bell Peppers do not have the capsaicin that other peppers have. And if you really want to get all of the bitter out, remove any of the white stuff in the pepper. In other peppers that and the seeds are where the heat is so you can reduce the strength of the bite in other peppers that way.

So don't skip the pepper in the recipe above. It imparts a nice flavor, adds no heat or a bite to the stew and just works out well.