Where's the Be...oh. There it is.

If you have access to a crock pot, stew is so stupidly easy to make it feels almost like a breach of contract not to make some around this time of year and eat it, and eat it, and keep on eating it until it's gone, by which time you probably won't ever want to fish the thing out of the closet ever again.

I call that 'tradition.'

I love a good stew, but only once or twice a year when the weather turns unexpectedly cold for the first time in September and maybe on a lazy weekend around Christmas. In July I'm more likely to throw some tuna salad on a roll and get the hell out of the kitchen rather than raise the temperature of our apartment even a little with my presence in it.

The weather turned a few days ago, just slightly but noticeably, and with it came a pit-of-the-stomach craving for autumn things, or at least for things I associate with autumn: corduroy floor pillows and saltines with cream cheese and Sunday afternoon football, and, of course,
...stew.

I've been trying to nail my father's stew recipe for years, and I never get it quite right. I think I came close this time, but I'm still missing something in the formulation that I can't quite put my finger on. I could just ask him, I guess, but I'd much rather come to him and proclaim that I've nailed it. Our relationship is like that.

In the meantime, this will do just fine. It'll make enough stew to stuff four people to the rafters.

Ingredients:

• 2 pounds of cubed beef, lean but not too lean
• 2 carrots, rough cut
• 2 celery ribs, rough cut
• 1 onion, rough cut
• 1 large potato, rough cut
• 8 mushrooms, whole or halved
• 1 cup red wine
• 1 cup water
• 1 bay leaf
• 1/2 tsp thyme
• 1/2 tsp dry mustard
• salt and pepper
  

The Gist:

I wasn't kidding about this being stupidly easy - take everything on that list, put it into a crock pot on low and it'll be done 8 hours later. The best way to take care of this is to arrange the ingredients in the pot the night before you want to eat it, stow it in the fridge until morning and put it on to cook before work; it'll be done by dinner.

You can also, as I did as an experiment, make herbed biscuits in the crock pot - drop spoonfuls of biscuit dough on top of the stew a half-hour before serving and turn the pot up to high - but realistically it makes the thing too heavy and starchy - the stew can support itself without any bready backup.