Here's what we've been having for dinner lately.

This chunky soup is a good way to use leftover vegetables, so is very flexible. You could put a little red wine in, if you felt like it, but it doesn't need it if your beef broth is flavorful. I found a really good powdered beef bouillon - Orrington Farms Broth Base. You can taste all kinds of vegetables in it, not just salt like some of the cubed bouillon.

Chunky Beef Soup

Round steak, cut into 3/4 inch dice
Flour for dredging (I used brown rice flour)
Salt and pepper
Vegetable oil
1/2 cup diced onion
1/4 cup diced carrot
1/4 cup diced celery
2 cups or so Beef broth or bouillon with water
1/2 can diced tomatoes
1/2 tsp Worcestershire sauce
1/4 tsp ground thyme
Corn
Peas
Green beans

Season the flour with the salt and pepper and toss the round steak in it. Brown the meat, removing to the crock pot as browned, and then cook the onion, carrot, and celery until tender, and put in the pot with the meat. Pour the broth into the skillet and stir around over medium low heat, stirring up the browned bits. Pour into the pot with the meat and add the Worcestershire sauce and thyme. Cover and cook on high for a couple of hours or more. Add the vegetables - corn, peas, green beans. If it is not thick enough, mix 1 tbsp cornstarch with water to make a slurry and stir it in. Cover and cook about 20 minutes more until thickened.

I don't think of my crock pot as requiring a full 6 to 8 hours to cook something. Of course, I do it sometimes, but set on high, a lot of stews and the like are done faster than that.

Lately I have been trying other types of flour than wheat flour, so I made a cherry dessert with crumb topping the other day, the filling thickened with tapioca starch. When it was hot, the filling was runny, but once it cooled, it set up to where the pieces of pie look like something out of a 1940s diner ad. Quick-cooking tapioca is used a lot to thicken fruit pies, but at our 7000 foot altitude, it's hard to get the pie filling to cook hot enough to soften the tapioca, so tapioca starch, which is like cornstarch, seemed worth a try.