Hi there, I'm Stephanie, and I have an unnatural obsession with my CrockPot. 

I'm okay with it.

Welcome to the A Year of Slow Cooking website.

I started this website in 2008 as a New Year's Resolution to use my crockpot slow cooker every day and write about it online.

I wanted to find a way to work from home while caring for my young children (I had two at the time, ages 3 and 6. 

I now have three children and they are 20, 17, and 11. I am much older and wiser than I was when I started this site. 

Also? I have more wrinkles.)

I had recently quit my fulltime preschool teaching job because my youngest was getting sick and I needed to take care of her. 

We thought it was daycare germs, but it was actually because she had Celiac, which is a gluten intolerance.

This was back in the dark ages of the internet -- and Celiac and gluten intolerance wasn't as mainstream as it was then.
(PS, she's fine now, and we have been fully gluten free since Sept of 2006. )

I started this site with no money down. The original URL was crockpot365.blogspot.com.

This is what the site used to look like:

thank you to the wayback machine!

I am not a chef.
I am not a nutritionist.

First and foremost, I'm a mom. 

When I started writing recipes for the internet I didn't know that somehow I'd become an expert on crockpot slow cooker recipes. I thought people would just tune in to see if I stuck to my resolution.

The Universe had something else in mind, and I ended up on Rachael Ray, Good Morning America, and my silly little food blog was named #3 most influential food blog in 2012.

I no longer come up with new recipes.

After coming up with recipes for a good 10 years, I didn't want to anymore. I started to feel weird about "creating" new recipes -- since really all you have to do is change an ingredient here or there and slap on a new name and all of a sudden it's "new."

That didn't feel right to me.

So I started to write about Slow Living and I got certified as a Life Coach for moms.

This feels better to me, and is more aligned with my purpose in life -- which is to help others.

In October of 2021, I began hosting the Slow Living Podcast.