Easy Slow Cooker Red Beans and Rice

Easy slow cooker recipe for Louisiana red beans and rice--not too spicy but plenty of flavor!

Pin it for later!

Seeing as tomorrow is Mardi Gras, I decided to make a slow cooker red beans and rice recipe to celebrate. As I started taking pictures of this recipe my kids were home from school with some friends. They were all hungry so I scooped them a bowl of beans and rice. They loved this recipe! "Can you give my mom that recipe? It's so good!" I didn't know if the kids would like it because it's a bit spicy (not bad) but they did. Yay!

This recipe is really easy. I debated on whether to make dried red beans or just use canned beans. I decided to just use canned beans for the sake of time but if you're interested I'll come up with a dried bean recipe in the future. It would be super easy (but just take more time to cook).

This recipe uses easy to find ingredients. The only thing I had to search for was the Andouille sausage (a cajun-seasoned sausage). There was only one brand available at the grocery store that I went to, but I did find it.

I like to soften up my onions and bloom the spices at the same time using the microwave. Don't laugh--I actually learned this method from America's Test Kitchen. No need to dirty a pan, just use a medium microwave safe bowl.

You'll pile the softened onions, the sausage, drained beans, diced green peppers and all the other ingredients into the slow cooker and turn it on for a few hours and walk away. I decided to cook the rice separately on the stove because I have gotten mixed results with rice in the slow cooker and I just didn't want to take the chance that this wouldn't work out. It was a good choice. I liked the dry rice paired with a wetter almost stew-like beans and sausage.

Get your Cajun on and make some red beans and rice!

Read the rest here »