Vegetable Beef Barley Soup

Last week I made veggie beef barley soup in the slow cooker. I make soups often and it's alway some random variation of whatever I've got on hand! On this day, the soup contained the following:

• 1/2 pound of stew meat (I buy a pound of organic meat at a time and split it among 2 meals. This is for two reasons: 1)money-organic meat isn't cheap and 2) health-you just dont need to eat that much meat. In soups and chilis, a half pound of meat goes a long way!
• Veggies-chopped onion, about 4 or 5 celery and carrots sticks, one red potato, a few mushrooms I had leftover and needed to use and some frozen peas.
• About 1/2 cup (or more) of barley. I love barley and put it almost every soup I make. It's healthy and it adds a little body to the soup.
• Thyme, pepper and a bay leaf
• Broth-If I don't have any homemade broth on hand I use organic veggie broth from Trader Joes. Its ingredients are acceptable as far as I'm concerned!

I prep all the ingredients the night before by washing and cutting the vegetables, cutting the stew meat into small pieces and gathering the staples out of my pantry and spice cupboard. I pretty much eyeball the liquid; in this case I used one carton of vegetable broth with nearly equal parts water. I don't like to use more than one carton of broth bc its too much sodium. In the morning I throw all the ingredients in the crock pot and set it on low for 8 hours. On this particular day we enjoyed our soup on some sourdough bread bowls. This is a rare treat that we don't have often.