Slow Cooker Beef & Broccoli

Toss out your takeout menus! This is the best tasting Chinese food I have ever made at home, not to mention the easiest. It even tastes better than any beef & broccoli I’ve ever eaten out of a white paperboard pail. The brown sugar and the garlic and the sesame oil and the soy sauce all mix together to make the most delectable sauce, and the beef and broccoli cooked to perfection in the slow cooker.

This recipe only takes 4 ½ hours total to cook, so it makes a great weekend recipe. If you work an 8+ hour day during the week like I do and can’t let this cook while you’re gone, you can also always cook it in the evening and refrigerate to serve the next day. My favorite part about using a slow cooker is just being able to toss the ingredients in and walk away, and this worked perfectly. I let the recipe start cooking a little after lunch time today, went to the gym, did some cleaning and errands, read for a while, got some other things done, and when it was dinner time, voila! It was already waiting.

Slow Cooker Beef & Broccoli
Source: Table for Two

Ingredients:
1 lb uncooked lean & trimmed boneless top round roast of beef, sliced thin and cut into bite-sized pieces (I bought it pre-sliced thin into cutlets at Wegmans and then just had to cut it into pieces)
1 cup fat free beef broth
½ cup low sodium soy sauce
1/3 cup brown sugar
1 T sesame oil (found by the other Asian products)
3 garlic cloves, minced
2 T cornstarch
2 cups frozen broccoli florets/pieces, unthawed

Directions:
1.    Combine the broth, soy sauce, brown sugar, sesame oil and garlic in your slow cooker and stir together to combine. Add the uncooked beef pieces and mix until the beef is covered by the liquid.
2.    Turn crock pot temperature to low and cover. Cook for 4 hours (the original recipe says 6 but my beef was perfect after 4 hours, so check to see if yours is done at 4 and if not you can add more time) until the beef is cooked through.
3.    Remove 4 tablespoons of the liquid from your slow cooker to a bowl and stir in 2 tablespoons of cornstarch. Once combined, add the cornstarch mixture back into the slow cooker and mix in thoroughly. Add the frozen broccoli and stir in. Re-cover the slow cooker and cook on low for another half hour.

Yields 4 (1 cup) servings. Weight Watchers Points Plus: 8 per serving (P+ calculated using the recipe builder on weightwatchers.com)
Nutrition Information per serving from myfitnesspal.com: 305 calories, 20 g carbs, 11 g fat, 29 g protein, 1 g fiber