Recipe News: Summer slow-cooker recipes leave you more time for enjoying yourself outdoors

"When it comes to summertime dishes, most folks think of chilled salads and grilled burgers, steaks and veggies. Sometimes, though, home life is too hectic even for those simple solutions to that eternal, unshakable question: "What's for dinner?"

When you have kids, a spouse or a roommate coming and going between athletic events, camp, work, the gym and a world of other outdoor activities, grilled food quickly becomes shoe leather and most salads are laughably light. Enter the slow cooker of summer.

Now, this is not the first time we've written about summertime slow-cooker recipes -- not the first time this summer, even. (See "Slow & Easy: The crockpot need not be shelved in summer if you use a light and proper hand," May 14 in the Post-Gazette.) But frankly, so many readers told us they found that story useful that we thought we'd share some new summer slow-cooking recipes that recently arrived in the slow-cooking books "Not Your Mother's Slow-Cooker Cookbook," by Beth Hensperger and Julie Kaufmann ($16.95) and "Fresh From the Vegetarian Slow Cooker," by Robin Robertson ($14.95); both are from the Harvard Common Press.

And after all, with 80 percent of Americans now owning slow-cookers, who are we to ignore tasty recipes that fit the season?"

Includes recipes for: