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You can’t — and shouldn’t — cook everything at once. And if you do, prepare to stand helplessly by when it’s time to plate dinner, as vegetables grow cold next to room-temperature starch and aggressively steaming meat. Remember that roast chicken you left sitting while your sautéed spinach converted to mulch? Once it’s out of the oven, it needs to sit for 15 minutes before you can even consider carving it. While meat rests, its internal temperature evens out and it gains about five degrees. And, most important to your guests, this is when the protein redistributes some of the juice to drier parts of the meat.

If you put the carrots and potatoes in with the beef to braise for five hours, you’ll have carrot and potato mush. Instead, roast the potatoes, blanch the carrots, simmer the beans, and sear the bacon bits, all separately and to perfection, and then add all these elements to a stew at the last minute.