Slow Cooker Recipe: Spicy Szechuan Ground Turkey and Green Beans

In this video Aviva Goldfarb shows you an easy dinner recipe, a slow cooker recipe for Chinese ground turkey and green beans. It takes just 10 minutes to make Spicy Szechuan Ground Turkey and Green Beans in the slow cooker or crock pot for homemade healthy Chinese food on a busy carpool or late work night.

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This is Aviva Goldfarb with the Six O’Clock Scramble, and today for the first time, I’m going to show you a slow cooker recipe. Now for a lot of people, the slow cooker is like their best friend because you can literally throw the ingredients in in the morning or in the afternoon before you run errands or drive carpool, and when you come home, dinner is done. So I’m going to show you a recipe that is perfect because not only is dinner done, but it includes your protein and your vegetables, so all you have to do is steam some rice or put it in the rice cooker, and you’ve got the whole meal ready to go when you get home. So we are making Spicy Szechuan Ground Turkey and Green Beans.

The way that we’re going to start is I have a pound of ground turkey—you can also use ground pork or ground chicken if you prefer, or you can even use meatless crumble, which we use sometimes. And I’m going to put that right in the slow cooker, and I’m just going to break it up a little bit in there so it’s not super chunky at the end. Now we’re going to make our sauce. So the sauce is three tablespoons of soy sauce or tamari, whatever you have. I’m going to measure them right in this bowl. Then we have one tablespoon of rice wine or mirin. Mirin’s a little bit sweeter than rice wine. It happens to be what I had on my shelf because I use it in a lot of Asian recipes.

Then we have about a quarter to a half teaspoon of crushed red pepper flakes, depending on how spicy you like it. We like it kind of spicy, so I’m going to go with the whole half teaspoon and put those right in there. And then we have a teaspoon of cornstarch. And this is just the thickener; it doesn’t really add any flavor. I’ll put that right in there to make the sauce a little thicker and almost creamier. And then we are going to add our garlic and ginger, so all these great, fresh, Asian ingredients.

So for the ginger, you can of course use frozen cubes if you prefer, I have fresh ginger here. You just want to peel it. Some people say it’s easier to peel with a grapefruit spoon. I’ve tried both ways; I just find it easier with my OXO peeler. So we’re going to have a tablespoon of fresh ginger. And so I have peeled it, and now what I want to do is chop it up into pretty even pieces and then take those pieces and turn them and keep chopping them because you’re going to want it minced, which is a really fine dice, so you don’t get big chunks in there. So I just keep turning it and chopping it. You see I have my knife like this, and of course I just sharpened it before we started. And then, you can get all fancy once it gets down here. Brush it off the knife occasionally. So we have about a tablespoon of minced ginger; I’m going to put that right in our sauce.

And then we have our garlic. So with garlic, you can again use minced garlic in the jar, you can use frozen garlic, I have fresh garlic. I also have kind of a mess of ginger down here. But I’m going to take the side of my knife and smash it to make it easy to peel. You want about two teaspoons of garlic. So for me these are pretty big cloves, so I thought that would be about two of these cloves. And peel your garlic. We’re going to stick it right in my favorite mincer. Okay, I think we got it. So, stick this whole big chunk in my giant Pampered Chef garlic peeler. I’ve raved about this before; it’s the only garlic press that I’ve ever had that actually works well. One mistake that I see a lot of people making when it comes to mincing garlic is—I’m going to show you the better way to do it—when you push it through, you want to use the back of your knife, not the front of your knife because you don’t want to dull your knife. So that’s one, and again, if you like it more garlicy, add more garlic, if you’re not the hugest fan… One thing that’s nice is when you walk in the door with the slow cooker, your whole house is going to smell like this nice, garlicy, Chinese meal. That is our sauce.

[Ashleemariecakes]

looks like a great slow cooker recipe!

[Downshiftology]

I love slow cooker recipes - so convenient!

[MarinaDelio]

I love the slow cooker - so helpful for busy nights!

[jeannettewalshchen]

love the bright colors in your kitchen...and I love all the flavors in this recipe.

[BetsyCohen]

I LOVE this recipe. I am always on the lookout for quick, easy and delish crockpot recipes and this one just went to the top of my must-try list.

[courtneyrbrown]

I don't even peel my ginger😛. I keep it in the freezer & just pull out a chunk & use the microplan to grate it up w/ my qarlic. Super easy & I always have it on hand😊