Kelly Lynn demonstrates a simple crock-pot vegetable stew and safety tips

Kelly Lynn, host of Kelly Lynn's Creative Kitchen, demonstrated how to make a basic vegetable stew in a crock pot using common leftovers, listing ingredients, preparation steps, seasoning options and safety tips during a recorded segment.

The segment matters because it offers a low-cost, flexible recipe that viewers can adapt to reduce food waste and control sodium and portion size; Lynn emphasized simple substitutions for low-sodium diets and methods for safely handling produce, knives and cookware.

Lynn began by naming the main ingredients she used: one onion, celery, a bell pepper, honey-glazed carrots, and four to five potatoes, plus about a quart of water and roughly a half cup to 1 cup of chicken broth (or chicken base). She advised rinsing and scrubbing vegetables before cutting and said she peels and halves the onion, slices celery into medium pieces, cores and strips the pepper, and cubes potatoes so they cook at roughly the same rate.

On seasoning, Lynn placed a chicken soup base in the bottom of the pot (she noted the product she used lists about 790 mg of sodium), then added garlic powder, a pinch of ginger, sage, Hungarian paprika, balsamic vinegar and parsley, and said canned beans can be added later to bulk up the stew. She suggested sea salt as an alternative for people watching sodium intake and encouraged tasting a small amount of the base on bread before finishing the pot.

For cooking, Lynn put the vegetables into the crock pot, placing potatoes in first because they cook slowest. She recommended stirring and checking the stew about every half-hour, adding water if needed, and said the dish can take about 3 to 4 hours to develop flavor but noted elsewhere in the recording that cooking on high was expected to take about 2½ hours.

Lynn also offered several food-safety and kitchen-safety tips: rinse produce, avoid cross-contamination by not handling vegetables after raw meat without washing hands or surfaces, keep knives sharp and handle them carefully, use wooden bowls and wooden spoons to help preserve flavor, and wipe counters with bleach spray when cleaning. She framed some practices as personal preferences (for example, leaving certain vegetables chunkier for texture) and recommended adjusting seasoning to taste as the stew cooks.

She closed by offering serving suggestions — crackers or crackers dipped into the stew — and invited viewers to email her to submit recipes or to appear as a co-host.

"You never want to touch meat before you touch your vegetables," Lynn said, underscoring cross-contamination precautions. "It's gonna take about 3 to 4 hours for this to cook," she added, while later saying the pot set on high would cook for about 2½ more hours.