11 Innovative Winter Warming Recipes

When the weather gets colder, it’s natural for home cooks to go looking for their favorite comfort food recipes. There’s nothing quite like the aroma of your favorite meal wafting through the kitchen or up from a plate piled high with lasagna, beef stew, or old-school mac and cheese, and the delicious taste of your first forkful when it hits your tongue.

Yet winter is also a tremendous opportunity to add a bit of variety to your recipe list, often with cool riffs on the classics, or adaptations of foods you like to cook or prepare through spring, summer, and fall. Below is our innovative collection of casseroles, soups, stews, and skillet meals that provide your table with variety, and potentially new favorites to put onto your best dishes list.

1. Chicken and Dumplings Casserole

Tender chicken in a savory gravy topped with a yummy, doughy layer of dumplings, is a mashup of classically comfortable winter warmers that totally makes sense! It’s just like the Chicken and Dumplings you know and love but simple to make and straight out of a casserole dish. The trick with making the Chicken and Dumplings Casserole, is getting the dumpling layer to bubble up through the liquid, so the rest settles into a delightfully savory gravy that you can’t stop spooning onto your plate!

2. Salisbury Steak and Potato Skillet

Adding potatoes to this much loved classic takes Salisbury steak to another, more hearty level – and you can cook it as a one-pan, time saving skillet meal! The extra liquid used to simmer the potatoes to perfection and make a lip-smackingly delicious onion gravy to spoon over the spuds and beef patties, helps make this recipe burst with winter warming flavor while remaining an economical feast. Our Salisbury Steak and Potato Skillet might have you ditching the original in favor of the one pot potato lovers’ version instead!

3. Slow Cooker Corned Beef

Through a decade’s trial and error, I’ve turned the traditional corned beef into a tremendous pull apart slow cooker meal. It’s layered with a sensational, yet common mix of herbs and spices that has helped reinvigorate a classic (and inexpensive) cut of meat. Slow Cooker Corned Beef is the perfect winter warmer – you can set it up in the morning and let it cook the day away before setting it before a hungry horde. All you need is some greens and creamy mash for a brilliant comfort dinner!

4. Slow Cooker Angel Chicken

Slow Cooker Angel Chicken is about pairing chicken with five shortcut ingredients and your slow cooker, so you end up with a delicious meal that takes basically no effort from you – that’s my kind of comfort food! All you need is a few ingredients, six chicken breasts and some angel hair pasta to get a complete winter warmer – creamy yet savory with a delicious sauce and juicy, tender chicken.

5. Scottish Rumbledethumps

Scottish Rumbledethumps is awesome to say, and even more awesome to eat! It’s a dish from the borderlands of southern Scotland and northern England. This dish combines cabbage, potatoes, and sharp cheddar cheese for a savory dish – people in the old days likely would have used whatever they had on hand to round out the recipe. Scottish Rumbledethumps is a brilliant side dish, but you can also customize the ingredients a little bit to make it the star of your dinner show!

6. No-Peek Beef Stew

Australia gets pretty hot, but I will still eat this No-Peek Beef Stew during the summer months (and the recipe gets a hammering during winter!). I love this stew because it’s completely hands – all you need to do is stir together your ingredients in a baking dish and let the oven do all the work for you. No-Peek Beef Stew goes brilliantly with creamy mash, or a big hunk of crusty bread!

7. Everything but the Kitchen Sink Soup

If you’ve got a little bit of a lot of things left in the fridge, then turning your random veggies into this magical Everything but the Kitchen Sink Soup. It is a great way to deliver colorful comfort food that cuts through the cold. It’s a great alternative to meaty casseroles, as the different flavors cook up together into a comfy, flavorful soup that is also rich with tasty herbs and spices.

8. Chicken Florentine Artichoke Casserole

Chicken Florentine Artichoke Casserole offers plenty of creamy goodness, but is quite low on the carbs. The spinach does a great job at giving the casserole some color and vibrancy that works in concert with rotisserie chicken, plenty of garlic, artichoke hearts (which really gets the flavor going) and two different types of cheese. This is a brilliant meal option when you want something that looks and tastes decadent, but you don’t want to be bogged down by stodgy pasta or potatoes!

9. Taco Sour Cream Rice Bake

This satisfying sour cream infused rice bake has plenty of taco flavor, but is different enough that it doesn’t feel like a repeat. I like that my taco obsessed kids are quite happy to sit down to a filling and flavorful Taco Sour Cream Rice Bake, and lower their clamoring for permanent taco Tuesday from a gigantic roar, to just a shout! It only takes thirty minutes from start to finish, so is perfect for busy weeknights, or those dreary winter evenings when the last thing you want to do is cook.

10. Southern Smothered Pork Chops

I heartily recommend pairing your pork chops with a salty, savory, slightly creamy onion and garlic gravy, and try these irresistible Southern Smothered Pork Chops. There’s no stovetop to oven transfer for this recipe – the cooking happens in your skillet on your cooktop. Just make sure you whip up a good serving of mash to eat with the pork chops, because spooning the gravy over them is a fantastically delicious experience!

11. Creamy Reuben Soup

The traditional reuben sits high up in my rankings of the best sandwiches in the world, so it’s only natural that I’m drawn to this hearty, rich Creamy Reuben Soup. It incorporates the main ingredients of a reuben sandwich – corned beef, sauerkraut, and swiss cheese – and adds some creamy extras and additional flavor. Throw some rye bread croutons on top to make this a stick-to-your-bones meal that’s perfect for cold and/or windy days.

Conclusion

As good as your personal list of classic recipes and favorite dishes can be, opening up your comfort food collection to new and vibrant additions is great for your collection and your tastebuds. These 11 Innovative Winter Warmers take comfort meals in delicious directions that I’m certain will be part of your cold weather rotation!