A slow cooker beef roast dinner that’s ready to devour when you get home from work? Yes!

I use my slow cooker and Instant Pot® throughout the year for a variety of things: chicken stock, tomato sauce, and other kitchen and cooking hacks.

I’ll never buy chicken stock again — especially when I have a recipe that calls for cooking it overnight in a slow cooker, or in an hour with the Instant Pot. You can hardly get any easier than that. The overnight slow cooker chicken stock recipe ends up yielding 12 cups of stock, so I typically keep two cups for the fridge and freeze the other 10 cups. (Yes, TEN cups.) And it tastes wonderful!

So, back to the slow cooker. Beef roasts are one of my favorite ways to use the slow cooker, any cut — it doesn’t matter. I watch the sales, buy beef roasts when they’re cheaper, and then freeze them most of the time. I’ve used frozen roasts in my slow cooker (yes, un-thawed) before, but this recipe starts out fresh.

I love that most slow cooker recipes are flexible. The day I made this one I didn’t have a ton of produce on hand, so I used red skin potatoes, rough chopped onions and some smashed garlic. Carrots, celery and fresh herbs would have been a nice addition though.

The beans in the photos are wax beans from my neighbors’ CSA pick-up that they graciously shared, and I steamed them separately at dinnertime. Only took a few minutes, and they tasted fabulous! You could also throw a cup of frozen peas into the slow cooker during the last 5-10 minutes and they’d cook right in the broth.

Tip: you need to be careful cooking a roast for too many hours in a slow cooker because it can dry out. I wouldn’t do this recipe on a 10 or 12 hour work day. Save it for an average workday, where you press the ‘start’ button as you’re walking out the door, and you know you won’t be gone for more than eight hours. Prep the roast the night before in the slow cooker pot, pop it in the fridge, and then just throw it into the unit in the morning—makes things less chaotic.