One of the most-used tools in my kitchen is the slow cooker. It’s the great cooking equalizer — even if you have no experience cooking, slow cooker chicken recipes allow you to just dump all the ingredients, let the pot do its magic and have a delicious meal ready several hours later. One of my favorite go-to recipes is this slow cooker chicken and rice.

A Healthier Chicken and Rice

Chicken and rice is super simple to make. This slow cooker recipe is pretty basic, so it’s great for picky eaters, but it’s also super flavorful and healthy. I always make chicken and rice with brown rice. White rice is a refined carbohydrate, which has no nutritional value. These types of carbs enter the bloodstream like sugar, triggering the release of insulin. What happens next is that your body converts the sugar into stored fat rather than energy.

Brown rice is a complex carbohydrate, so it resists immediate breakdown. Instead, the body breaks it down and converts the food into sugar over time. The two don’t taste significantly different, either, but brown rice is 1,000 times better for you.

Along with the chicken and rice, you’ll use chicken bone broth instead of plain old water. The bone broth is one of the best things you can consume for leaky gut, digestion issues and boosting the immune system, and it works perfectly in this crockpot chicken and rice.

How to Make Slow Cooker Chicken and Rice

If you’re ready to make this fool-proof chicken and rice, let’s get started.

Start by dicing both the onions and chicken.

I used boneless, skinless chicken breast here, but you could easily swap in boneless, skinless chicken thighs instead.

Next, add all of the ingredients to the slow cooker.

Yes, that includes the cheese! This goat milk cheese will add a little extra flavor to this dish.

Finally, step away from the slow cooker. Go to the gym, get some work done, go shopping. When you return to the crockpot in 8 hours, dinner will be ready and waiting!