One Crock Away From Beef Stew

The Crocksman is a weekly Voracious column about you and your slow-cooker. It runs every Tuesday.

Back in the day, my grandparents used to buy a cow (or two) a year. They divided the beef among their kids. So once a year my grandparents would come over with a chest full of T-bones, roasts, ground beef, and ... liver. When my brother and I chose universities in the eastern Washington/northern Idaho area, close to my grandparents, we were spoiled with more home-cooked meals than we had any right to. My grandma's greatest hits included:
-- Rib steak
-- Baby back ribs (boiled first, of course)
-- Chicken Divan
-- Beef stew

This is why people are vegetarians.

Anyone who's been hungry--well, as hungry as spoiled kids in college think they are--can appreciate what a 20-ounce steak and mountain of mashed potatoes can feel like in early May. But it was the beef stew that was the dark horse of this bunch. Grandma cooked it--as she still does--in a long-seasoned cast-iron skillet on the stove. It's heavenly.

I recently found a paper-wrapped roast from the last shipment of beef--my Mom has picked up the slack, and still visits the same butcher in Eastern Washington--hidden deep in the back of my freezer. It didn't have much fat on it -- a necessity for a good roast, in my opinion-- but I remembered grandma's old beef stew recipe, and decided to try a revised recipe in the slow-cooker. It works. Those of you--and I'm looking at you, you cocky Mr. Surly Gourmand--who think that browning meat before you put it in the slow-cooker is the only way to go aren't completely wrong (but no less smug).

I cut the roast up into small cubes, rolled the beef in flour, and dropped a puddle of vegetable oil into my cast-iron skillet on the stove. When the oil got hot, I rolled the cubes of beef until they were brown, and almost crispy on all sides.

I then rooted around in the fridge to find whatever veggies I could. I procured an onion, two stalks of celery, and a bag of baby carrots. I tossed all of the above my slow-cooker and added about 15 ounces of Elysian's Immortal IPA, and left it on high.

The beautiful thing about this recipe is that it doesn't take all day. Six hours later, it was ready to eat. It wasn't exactly stew, as I didn't add much in the way of thickener. But then again, I like my stews to be more like thick soups. And I just figured out to do with those roasts with just not enough fat on 'em.