Cube Steak — The Slow Cooker Meal I Set Up at 4 a.m. and Forgot About Until Dinner

Owen and Nora are five weeks old, which means they are technically negative four weeks old by due-date math, which the NICU doctors call their "adjusted age" and which I find helpful for calibrating expectations. They are doing exactly what five-week-old premature babies do, which is mostly eating and sleeping and occasionally opening their eyes and looking at the world with an expression of mild suspicion that I recognize as a Kowalczyk family trait.

I have developed a system. Ryan's shifts follow a pattern and I have mapped it against the babies' feeding schedule and Patty's availability and arrived at something that works, which is to say something that prevents me from actually falling down from exhaustion while still keeping two small humans alive. The system involves a lot of written notes. The notes are all in slightly different handwriting because I write them at different hours of the night.

Patty and Steve came together on Sunday and Steve held Owen for two hours without speaking, which is the longest I have seen Steve sit still since approximately 2004. He did not say anything about it. He did not need to. Patty photographed Steve holding Owen six times and each time Steve pretended not to notice. I photographed Steve photographed by Patty when nobody was watching and that photo is going on the wall.

I made my first actual meal this week. Not reheated, not one-handed. An actual meal: pasta with marinara sauce from a jar, Italian sausage from the Aldi freezer pack, and a bag of baby spinach wilted in at the end. Ryan had gotten both babies down for a simultaneous thirty-minute nap and I stood at the stove and cooked it in twenty-two minutes and we ate it at the table like adults and it tasted like the best thing I had eaten in a month. It was not the best thing I had eaten in a month. It was pasta from a jar. It was everything.

That pasta dinner taught me something: the victory isn’t in the recipe, it’s in the margin of time you can carve out. So the next thing I made was this cube steak—because I could drop everything in the slow cooker during a 4 a.m. feeding, shuffle back to bed, and come back eight hours later to an actual meal that required nothing from me except a fork. It’s the kind of cooking that works when you only have one hand free and approximately twelve working brain cells, which is to say it was designed, spiritually, for exactly where I am right now.

Slow Cooker Cube Steak

Prep Time: 10 min | Cook Time: 7–8 hours | Total Time: 8 hours 10 min | Servings: 4

Ingredients

• 4 cube steaks (about 1/2 lb each)
• 1 packet (1 oz) onion soup mix
• 1 can (10.5 oz) cream of mushroom soup
• 1/2 cup beef broth
• 1 medium yellow onion, thinly sliced
• 1/2 tsp garlic powder
• 1/2 tsp black pepper
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
• 2 tbsp cornstarch (optional, for thickening gravy)
• 2 tbsp cold water (optional, for thickening gravy)

Instructions

1. Layer the onions. Spread the sliced onions across the bottom of a 5- or 6-quart slow cooker to form an even base.
2. Season the steaks. Season cube steaks on both sides with garlic powder, salt, and black pepper. Place them on top of the onion layer.
3. Make the sauce. In a small bowl, whisk together the cream of mushroom soup, beef broth, onion soup mix, and Worcestershire sauce until combined. Pour evenly over the steaks.
4. Cook low and slow. Cover and cook on LOW for 7–8 hours or on HIGH for 4–5 hours, until the steaks are very tender and pulling apart at the edges.
5. Thicken the gravy (optional). If you want a thicker gravy, whisk cornstarch into cold water to form a slurry, stir it into the slow cooker liquid, replace the lid, and cook on HIGH for an additional 15–20 minutes until the gravy thickens.
6. Serve. Ladle steaks and gravy over mashed potatoes, egg noodles, or rice. Everything can be done one-handed if needed. No judgment.

Nutrition (per serving)

Calories: 340 | Protein: 35g | Fat: 14g | Carbs: 14g | Fiber: 1g | Sodium: 890mg