It’s a pretty indisputable fact that one of the best winter meals is a thick bowl of warm stew. But, since I’m a vegetarian, I usually pass on the beef and barley and lean toward hearty vegetable based stews. After a bit of trial and error, I’ve melded a few recipes together to create this dish. Since we’re on a slow cooker binge lately, I figured I’d share it with you guys! Root vegetables are always so flavorful, and by the time late fall or winter hits, my parents are finished with the fresh apples and gourds and there’s an abundance of root vegetables resting in the cellar. It’s a great make-ahead dish, so I’ll usually make it on a Sunday, and bring a huge container of it to work with me to lunch on during the busy work week.

Also, when the furnace at my boyfriend’s apartment broke and I suffered through a 47-degree apartment for a weekend, this root vegetable and lentil stew was an absolutely perfect dish.

If you haven’t noticed lately, I’ve been on a major slow cooker binge. I guess I’ve been inadvertently slowly making the transition from the fall theme of my Food Fridays segment into a Crock Pot/ slow cooker theme? It’s about this time of the year when I start getting really busy. Between work, end of semester finals and the DIY holiday craftiness that suddenly starts taking up a part-time job’s worth of every day, I really don’t want to put the same effort into cooking my meals that I do in the fall. Hence, the slow cooker. It’s pretty great. Unfortunately, most feasible slow cooker recipes are not very vegetarian friendly, which is a bummer. I love a good vegetarian chili or stuffed peppers, but I like a little variety. I found this recipe the other day, and I thought it was actually pretty good. It branded itself as a orange honey tofu, but by the time I finished with it, it ended up more as a slow cooker stir fry, and I’m not too disappointed about it.

I love mac and cheese.

I promise you I’m a 24-year-old.

I swear.

The caveat? I hate boxed mac and cheese. I know Kraft had good intentions, but if it comes in a plastic dish and you cook it in a microwave, I will not eat it. Ever. I like real cheese that doesn’t come in powder form.

So, when I found out you can actually make mac and cheese in a slow cooker, I was floored. I headed straight to Pinterest and typed in “CROCK POT MAC AND CHEESE.” Most of the recipes I found required you to pre-cook your noodles or use Velveeta. 1. If you’re already cooking your noodles on the stovetop, you might as well just make the mac and cheese then and there, rendering the whole slow cooker concept pointless, and 2. I’m trying to avoid fake cheese.

The next day, I asked my coworker if she’d ever made mac and cheese in a slow cooker, and she said, “Yeah, you just dump in a bunch of uncooked noodles and milk and cheese and let it sit there.” Might as well give it a try. I did a bit of Googling because I knew it was probably a little trickier than that, but it really wasn’t hard at all.

It was delicious and only took five minutes of preparation.

I promised and I now I deliver. Remember last week’s multigrain bread recipe post? I mentioned how great that bread goes with a hearty slow cooker soup, like this corn chowder recipe. This is such a great fall day recipe my friends and I accidentally stumbled upon during homecoming weekend, taking inspiration from a few blogs and recipe sites. We threw everything together while we were pregaming (read: we had quite a bit of Captain and cider and were a little tipsy) before our alma mater’s football game. We cranked the slow cooker on, left for tailgate and came back after the game to fully prepared dinner. Can’t get much more convenient than this. Here’s the incredibly easy five ingredient recipe.