Slow Cooker Beef Vegetable Noodle Soup

The world changed this week. Not my world — my world has been changing for two years, slowly, the way erosion changes a coastline. The larger world. The one outside the kitchen. A virus. A pandemic. The schools are closing. The country is closing. Everything is closing, and I am standing in my kitchen thinking: the kitchen doesn't close. The stove doesn't care about viruses. The brisket braises regardless. The challah rises regardless. Whatever is happening out there, in here the rules are the same: six hours, low and slow, and the meat will be tender. This is the only certainty I have. I am keeping it.

I am sixty-three years old, which makes me "high risk" in the new vocabulary of pandemic, and Marvin is seventy and immunocompromised by the medication, which makes him more than high risk, and suddenly the world's fear has caught up with my personal fear and everyone is as scared as I have been for two years, and I want to say: welcome. Welcome to living in constant awareness that the person you love is vulnerable. Welcome to the hygiene, the precautions, the counting of days. I have been doing this since September 2018. You are all beginners. I am a professional.

The school switched to remote instruction. I, a woman who has commanded a physical classroom for forty-one years, am now trying to teach Fitzgerald through a laptop screen from the kitchen table while Marvin sits beside me, shadowing, confused by the screen, sometimes wandering into the frame. My juniors can see my kitchen. They can see my husband. They can see the reality of a woman teaching English while caring for a man who needs her, and I am simultaneously mortified and defiant: this is my life. This is all of our lives now. We are all teaching from our kitchens. We are all caring for someone. We are all doing our best in rooms that were never designed for this.

I cannot have anyone come to help with Marvin. The pandemic means isolation, and isolation with an Alzheimer's patient is a sentence I would not wish on my worst student. It means I am teaching and caregiving and cooking, all within the walls of the Oceanside house, with no break, no relief, no Helen Marcowitz bringing coffee in the faculty lounge, no Friday dinners with Rebecca, no visits from David and the grandchildren. Just me and Marvin and the kitchen and the disease and the virus and the stove that doesn't close.

I wrote a blog post about quarantine cooking — how the kitchen becomes the only room that makes sense when the world stops making sense. The readers responded with a desperate gratitude that matched my own. We are all in our kitchens. We are all cooking. The stove is the last hearth. The soup is the last medicine. We will survive this. We always survive. That is what the soup is for.

I wrote about the soup because the soup is what I had. No brisket left in the house — the stores were picked clean, the shelves half-empty, everyone panic-buying at once — but I had stew beef in the freezer and carrots and celery and a slow cooker that I set before my first Zoom class and came back to eight hours later, the whole house smelling like something that had been tended. That is the point. You set it, you go teach Fitzgerald to teenagers who are scared, you go sit with Marvin, you go do all the things, and the soup waits for you. It does not need you to watch it. It only needs you to come home to it.

Prep Time: 20 minutes | Cook Time: 8 hours | Total Time: 8 hours 20 minutes | Servings: 8

Ingredients

1 1/2 lbs beef stew meat or boneless chuck roast, cut into 1-inch cubes
1 tablespoon olive oil
3 medium carrots, peeled and sliced into coins
3 stalks celery, sliced
1 medium yellow onion, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 medium Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled and cut into 3/4-inch cubes
1 can (14.5 oz) diced tomatoes, with juices
6 cups low-sodium beef broth
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1 teaspoon dried parsley
1 teaspoon kosher salt, plus more to taste
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
2 cups wide egg noodles, uncooked
1 cup frozen peas

Instructions

Sear the beef. Heat olive oil in a skillet over medium-high heat. Working in batches, sear the beef cubes on two sides until browned, about 2 minutes per side. You are not cooking them through — you are building flavor. Transfer to the slow cooker.
Build the base. Add the carrots, celery, onion, garlic, potatoes, and diced tomatoes (with their juices) to the slow cooker over the beef.
Add the liquid and seasoning. Pour in the beef broth and Worcestershire sauce. Add the thyme, parsley, salt, and pepper. Stir gently to combine.
Cook low and slow. Cover and cook on LOW for 7 to 8 hours, or on HIGH for 4 to 5 hours, until the beef is fork-tender and the vegetables are soft.
Add the noodles and peas. In the last 20 to 25 minutes of cooking, stir in the egg noodles and frozen peas. Cover and cook on HIGH until the noodles are tender but not mushy.
Taste and finish. Taste the broth and adjust salt and pepper as needed. Ladle into bowls and serve with crusty bread if you have it, or on its own if you don’t.

Nutrition (per serving)

Slow Cooker Beef Vegetable Noodle Soup — The Stove That Doesn’t Close