Healthy Slow Cooker Teriyaki Chicken Recipe

November 2, 2017 Rebecca Baron 26 Comments

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This healthy slow cooker teriyaki chicken recipe with a garlic teriyaki sauce is an easy, one-pot meal that can be versatile so you can change the ingredients to your liking.

Here where we live in Utah we have had a lot of snow recently, including southern and central where there typically isn't a ton of snow. Also, there were huge storms on the East Coast. My friend who lives in Arizona got snow. This is a big winter and you know what this weather makes me want?

Yummy, warm food.

There is nothing like being by a fireplace or warm home with a bowl of delicious chicken and rice.I love this recipe because it has your meat, veggies, and sauce all in one pot and it ends up with a sweet and tangy flavor and is so easy but doesn't have all the questionable ingredients that similar recipes have.

You can also change up the ingredients and try other things you like, such as green beans, sweet or white potatoes, snap peas, butternut squash, etc. - really almost any vegetable will work and you can change up the flavor just by experimenting with the vegetables.

My inspiration for this slow cooker chicken recipe doesn't make a ton of sense. My family was at a HUGE church party with over a thousand people a few summers ago. They had a luau theme and served rice with teriyaki chicken over it and I think maybe peppers and onions with it.

It's been so long I can't remember for sure. I had never heard of a teriyaki bowl before, but now I keep seeing them all over the place. Apparently, I've been living under a rock . . . I really liked the dish, but I knew it could be way better with some tweaks and a homemade sauce.

This sauce doesn't exactly taste like teriyaki, but I like it better. I don't really like normal teriyaki sauce though, so you may feel differently. I almost always think homemade is better, if not better tasting, I always feel better after a homemade meal as compared to a meal with bottled and canned things. This is another one of my recipes where you can use the main recipe as a starting point and I'll tell you a bunch of substitutions and variations I make with it:

Cook the chickenand vegetables in the oven. I cook them in separate pans, so the juice from the chicken doesn't soften the veggies. That way they get nice and crispy-roasted and are so good.
Instead of putting the veggies in for the last hour, bake them in the oven on 400 for an hour instead and they are so good and roasted.
I also like to cook the veggies on my husband's Traeger. It's a smoker/grill and they turn out really good.
There are tons of different things you can serve this over, depending on your diet and preferences - white rice (Jasmine is my favorite), short grain brown rice *, quinoa *, cauliflower "rice" (do you have any other ideas?)
I also like to make this in the Instant Pot *. Just put the chicken and sauce in the Instant Pot and push Meat/Stew and it takes 35 minutes, plus time to get to pressure. Cook the veggies separately using one of the methods above. The chicken turns out so tender, but the sauce isn't as thick and nice as when you do it in the crockpot. So sometimes I'll cook the chicken separately in the Instant Pot and make the sauce separate in a saucepan.
Oh, I love to throw a handful of whole garlic cloves in with the chicken. Roasted garlic is the BEST.
I also usually put some pineapple on top. It gives it a bit of a Hawaiian flair and a freshness.
I often substitute the honey with Grade B maple syrup and it gives it a deeper flavor and I don't feel like you need as much syrup as honey. It could be my imagination, but I'll often only put about 2 Tbl. of maple syrup and I think it's fine, but I don't like sweet food and I really try to limit my simple sugars.

OK. Now it's your turn. I would love your ideas for substitutions and variations on this chicken thighs recipe. Please let me know what works. I'm sure the other readers will appreciate it!

What are your favorite things to do on a cold winter day? We love to stay inside and play games or watch a movie together. Share in the comments what you like to eat or activities you enjoy doing in the cold winter days to make it more enjoyable.

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