Slow Cooker Pumpkin Beef Stew

Part headless horseman, part robot apocalypse. Somehow cute

So, Halloween has finally come and gone, which means that it's time for the time honored tradition of buying the discounted garbage pumpkins that grocery stores weren't able to sell to jack-o-lantern obsessed college students and soccer moms. It also means coming to the grim realization that you are the current owner of an estimated 53.7 pounds of pumpkins, and you need to figure out something to do with both of them. Fortunately, pumpkin is kind of super versatile. In this crazy world of pumpkin spiced everything that we live in, we usually only focus on the sweet uses for pumpkin. But pumpkin can go savory, and even spicy. The only limit is your imagination, and the very real possibility of losing all of your friends when you give them a "pumpkin spice latte'" with jalapenos in it.

Ingredients:

1 Pie Pumpkin (the type of pumpkin you use isn't actually of much concern to me. But average pumpkins are about twice the size of pie pumpkins, which are essentially Pomeranian pumpkins, so keep that in mind when deciding how much of your stolen jack-o-lantern you're using)

1 lb. Beef Shank

3 cups Chicken Stock

1 standard-issue Onion

3 ribs Celery

1 Parsnip

1 Chipotle Pepper

2 cloves Garlic

2 Bay Leaves

1/4 tsp Black Pepper

1/4 tsp Cinnamon

Salt

The first thing you're going to have to do is to have survived Halloween. Which, if sensationalist fear-mongering news stories are any indication, is no easy feat. You've got satanic cults, razor blades in your candy, neighborhood teens attacking your home and family to try and pry Smarties from your cold dead hands. It's a mess. Fortunately, like everything else you see on TV or read on the internet, that's pretty much a pile of lies (And yes, I'm aware that you read this on the internet. You sniffed out the hidden paradox. Congratulations! Have a pumpkin. They're lying around pretty much everywhere these days). Now that we've established that you're either still alive or too stubborn to let a pesky thing like dying keep you from making this stew, choppity chop up your chipotle pepper, onion and garlic. Rinse off your celery and chop it into chunks before adding it into the party. Then, using whatever vegetable torture device you have handy, remove the skin from your parsnip and pumpkin. Not so smiley now, are they? The parsnip holds its shape pretty well, so you can cut it as big or small as you want to really. The pumpkin, however, doesn't have that kind of structural integrity, so to make sure there's any visible pumpkin left in your stew when it's cooked, cut that thing into large chunks.

Bowl number 1 of the 3 eaten that night. By me.

Now it's time for the "just dump everything together in a slow cooker and walk the crap away from it" portion of the evening. So do that. Toss all of your chopped everything into your slow cooker along with your beef shank, chicken stock, bay leaves, pepper, cinnamon, and a healthy pinch of salt. If you're one of those ghosts we mentioned earlier, use 1.75 unhealthy pinches of salt. Set that sucker to low and find something to do for the next 10 hours or so, because that's how long we're going to let it cook. I recommend sleeping, or taking advantage of the fact that other people are sleeping to go into their homes and move everything two inches to the left. Whatever it is that you people do. Your patience will be rewarded with a delicious, hearty, slightly spicy stew with beef that's fall-apart tender. You can totally top it off with the roasted pumpkin seeds we made last week to double down on your pumpkin deliciousness if you choose. Regardless, this stew is the perfect thing to warm you up to brave the chilly rainy weather and go look at all of the Christmas ads outside.