Slow cooker trickery

For Christmas, my siblings were kind enough to get me a rice cooker/slow cooker contraption (I may have asked for one, in my quest to eat more healthily and lose the ever-increasing gut.) and I've made both the slow-cook recipes that came with it.

Yesterday, I tried my hand at the "chicken bacon casserole" which turned out basically to be the insides of a chicken pot pie. Yes, I enjoyed it.

But I kind of thought the whole point to slow cooking was to put stuff in a pot, turn it on, then have a delicious meal ready when you return home from work. No one told me that all the "prep" would actually involve chopping and chopping and cooking!

Both recipes required me to brown the meat, then saute chopped vegetables before plopping it all into the cooking bowl. If you have to cook it all anyway, you might as well finish cooking it and just eat it instead of waiting another half-day! That, of course, is just my opinion.