Soup is almost better than sex.

Here’s your chance to throw together the ultimate comfort food: Marcy’s Beef Barley Soup. This is my own recipe after decades of happy culinary experimentation, and lucky for you it’s as easy as it is fabulous ... even if I say so myself. You can probably feed a small army or half the neighborhood with one pot. Trust me.

• 8 cups vegetable stock
• 1½ lbs. round steak, cubed
• ¼ cup olive oil
• 6 carrots, peeled and sliced
• 4 to 6 ribs of celery, chopped
• 1 bag washed baby spinach
• 1 can kidney beans, drained and rinsed
• 1 can diced tomatoes with liquid
• 1 lb. white mushrooms, sliced
• 1 giant yellow onion, chopped
• ½ cup raw barley
• 1 tablespoon dried parsley
• 1 tablespoon salt (or to taste)
• ½ teaspoon black pepper

Life doesn’t get much easier than this! Just heat the olive oil in a gigantic kettle and brown the beef cubes over medium-high heat, then toss in all the remaining ingredients and simmer, covered, for three hours. Four hours would be even better. That’s it. Obviously you can adjust the salt and pepper if you like more or less, and you can also skip the spinach if you want to. I happen to love the flavor of spinach in my soup and it also adds lots of vitamins.

Serve this with a nice crusty baguette and a few extra napkins for any slobs in your crowd. A nice dessert afterwards would be a handful of raisins or cheesecake. (Actually, I vote for cheesecake.) Bon appetit and thank you for reading this.