Company Pot Roast
- By Katie Roche
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- 18 Mar, 2019
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I do not like pot roast. I have vivid memories of trying to power through chewing dry chunks of beef and mushy carrots at the table on a Sunday afternoon after church. The real mysteries to me about pot roast are these: 1) how it smells SO GOOD during the searing phase and is still somehow SO GROSS and 2) how no one else in society seems to share this aversion with me. Anytime pot roast is mentioned in the company of others, someone inevitably goes, "Ooohhh YUMMM" and then everyone else agrees with that person. People have strong associations of pot roast as a home-y Sunday dinner (midday, after church, because that's "dinner" on Sundays; the rest of the week, "dinner" is the evening meal and "supper" is not a thing) and I do somewhat share those - pot roast was always one of dad's culinary contributions in the Kelley household. But I also have strong associations of it combining all of the worst food textures on the planet: stringy, chewy, tough, and mushy. And somehow, all of those at once. Obviously, then, I approached Ina's pot roast recipe with quite a bit of skepticism. Surely, I thought, if anyone could get me to like it it would be her.
ItemQuest was not too intense. We picked up the vegetables from the regular grocery and the meat and wine from Costco. Ina again called for a "Burgundy" wine, which means nothing to me, and which I discovered last week seems to just mean that the wine is from a particular region of France. Well, a Costco employee approached me in the wine section asking if I needed help and I said that I didn't, but he persisted in trying to find out what type of wine I was shopping for and I told him it was for pot roast, not for drinking, and he recommended whatever that is in the picture. He said it was a "good pot roast wine". Whatever the heck that means. 20 minutes of old-people-traffic-jam and $3 worth of lunch for both of us and we were out of there with our bulk laundry detergent, giant case of sparkling water (yeah I know, it's ridiculous but I LIKE IT), and key ingredients. Are we doin' this? Let's DO THIS.
ItemQuest was not too intense. We picked up the vegetables from the regular grocery and the meat and wine from Costco. Ina again called for a "Burgundy" wine, which means nothing to me, and which I discovered last week seems to just mean that the wine is from a particular region of France. Well, a Costco employee approached me in the wine section asking if I needed help and I said that I didn't, but he persisted in trying to find out what type of wine I was shopping for and I told him it was for pot roast, not for drinking, and he recommended whatever that is in the picture. He said it was a "good pot roast wine". Whatever the heck that means. 20 minutes of old-people-traffic-jam and $3 worth of lunch for both of us and we were out of there with our bulk laundry detergent, giant case of sparkling water (yeah I know, it's ridiculous but I LIKE IT), and key ingredients. Are we doin' this? Let's DO THIS.
The appropriately sized meat in two pieces so Dan tied them together. There's no way they would have fit in one layer to brown in my medium-sized Dutch oven otherwise.
I don't own a lot of Pampered Chef kitchen gadgetry but I must say, I SWEAR BY this flour shaker. It's so handy for when you're making biscuits/pie crust/pizza dough and need to flour your surface. It's also handy for flouring baking dishes, and in this case, it was handy for not having to try to fit that giant roast in a Ziploc bag so I could dredge it in flour. I just rotated it and made it snow from the flour thingy like we were in a beautiful culinary snow globe. I highly recommend it. As you can see, my counter was obviously still a mess but that's mostly because all the appropriately sized cutting boards were in the dishwasher and none of my plates are big enough to hold this. Not kidding, my dinner plates are actually the Le Creuset SALAD plates - the dinner plates are some ludicrously giant size like 14 in. or something. The salad plates do nicely for entire dinners just not, you know...5 pounds of pot roast.
Dan got started browning it while I started chopping the 8 cups of vegetables that get added once browning is complete. At this stage, like most things recently, I began to worry that my Dutch oven wouldn't fit everything - all that meat, all those vegetables, AND several cups of liquid between the wine and the chicken stock.
This cute lil vegetable parfait is a combination of carrots, celery, onions, and leeks - 2 cups of each. It may seem ridiculous to some of you that I measure vegetables but I'm not about to use 2 entire onions when she only calls for two cups without measuring - I can't play games with the space in my Dutch oven and I definitely cannot use more vegetables than necessary and risk the rest of the liquid not fitting. The only other things I've ever used this large of a Pyrex for are watering the Christmas tree and measuring large quantities of cake batter. Alas...it came in handy today when I was cooking five pounds of meat for two people. (I did try to invite people, but there is another sport on that people are really into right now. I think basketball. Idk.)
I added all the liquid as well as a bouillon cube and the herb bundle and then the meat went back in and it went in the oven for 2 1/2 hours. I salt everything excessively but the amount of salt in this is unbelievable - you season throughout (as you should) but also add a bouillon cube?! And when Ina adds salt at various steps of her recipes, it's always by the tablespoon, not the teaspoon. I normally like this because I find most food under-seasoned and hers are the only recipes that I don't finish and immediately cover in salt. But this did seem like a lot. Oh well! Part of my complaint about pot roast is that it is kind of tasteless so I hoped the insane amount of salt would rectify that. As you can see, everything fit but just barely. As you can also see, there are entire plum tomatoes in there but no potatoes. Dan was not impressed by this.
2 1/2 hours later, everything was done but, in my opinion, looked exactly the same only somehow less appetizing.
Dan removed the meat and started sneaking chunks of it to eat, which he declared delicious. He eyed me skeptically as I followed Ina's instructions to remove half of the liquid and vegetables from the Dutch oven and puree it in a food processor until smooth to make a sauce. Her recipe note was about how no one ever gets pot roast sauce/vegetable textures just right because they're either too thin or too chunky and I really didn't resonate with this because I think it's all wrong on the basis of taking things that were once crunchy and fresh and reducing them to mushy and hot. Now we're blending them? Pot roast baby food? The agony is real.
Look me in the eye and tell me you haven't seen vomit that EXACT SHADE. You can't. Similar to the coq au vin, once again the liquid was thickened with a beurre manie after this vomit mixture was added back in. Is your mouth watering? Mine wasn't...but my eyes were, knowing I was going to have to eat this.
After all my fuss about how gross pot roast is, I admitted to Dan that this was the best pot roast I have ever had but that I would still never be sitting around thinking, "Oh man, you know, I'm just CRAVING pot roast right now." And he said that's about as high of praise as he could expect from me about this dish. He loved the meat, but was not interested in the sauce because he insists that correct pot roast should have potatoes and definitely should NOT have tomatoes. He did eat it, but I had to tell him that he was not allowed to only eat the meat - he had to eat some sauce with it as well. I made it through my slice and then actually enjoyed dipping my bread in the remaining sauce.
The main advantage of this dish, as noted in the title, is that if you're having friends over it's fairly economical (the meat ended up costing about $5/lb which isn't bad), other people actually seem to like it, and you can really prep ahead since the steps after the 2 1/2 hour oven voyage are minimal. So much time to vacuum (or knit and pretend you vacuumed!) while it's in the oven for eternity. The downside, in my opinion, is that although Ina sort of remedied the dry meat thing (I'll admit it, the meat really was good), it's still mushy vegetables and not at all craveable. I'm glad I tried this once as I would, I suppose, place it in the category of "back to basics" as the cookbook is titled. I would, however, prefer to stick to something that's not basically gross.
The main advantage of this dish, as noted in the title, is that if you're having friends over it's fairly economical (the meat ended up costing about $5/lb which isn't bad), other people actually seem to like it, and you can really prep ahead since the steps after the 2 1/2 hour oven voyage are minimal. So much time to vacuum (or knit and pretend you vacuumed!) while it's in the oven for eternity. The downside, in my opinion, is that although Ina sort of remedied the dry meat thing (I'll admit it, the meat really was good), it's still mushy vegetables and not at all craveable. I'm glad I tried this once as I would, I suppose, place it in the category of "back to basics" as the cookbook is titled. I would, however, prefer to stick to something that's not basically gross.
For this post, I wanted to combine two summertime flavors into the crisp recipe one of my oldest Alaskan friends passed on to me years ago. Rhubarb, if you're unfamiliar, is a reddish stalk that kind of resembles really big celery. It's very tart and is most commonly paired with strawberry. I've rarely seen it star in its own show dessert-wise, but my friend Kylee has been making rhubarb crisp for years and it's the best crisp I know of. Blueberries are usually in season in late summer; I have not been home for a blueberry season since Dan's last deployment in 2018 so in order to make this recipe I actually used blueberries from a friend's parents' farm in upstate SC! They're a little sweeter than the blueberries I'd have picked at home, but they worked well. I'm going to pretend like I was actually picking blueberries at home in Alaska for the purpose of showing you what that would look like.
I was getting all ready to write this post, going through my process with photos starting in my kitchen when I realized that a lot of my friends probably don't know what fireweed is or where it comes from and this recipe actually starts far, far away from my kitchen. This will be the first of a few posts highlighting iconic Alaskan ingredients. I've wanted to do this for a while because my home inspires me in so many ways, writing and cooking particular among them. Fireweed is a wildflower that is rather ubiquitous in southcentral Alaska and is often considered a gauge for how long summer will last. It is said that when the blooms reach the top of the plant, winter is six weeks away. Whether or not that's accurate, fireweed is found all over in late summer in Alaska. Here is some I spotted in mid-July by Eklutna Lake:
If you know Dan and me very well, you probably know by now that if our life were a sitcom, he'd low-key be the funniest character. Because that is true, I thought I'd include his bottom ten with accompanying remarks before giving the actual bottom ten. His are hilarious, but aren't as legitimate as mine because he actually tried way fewer of these than one might think. I realized as he was flipping through the book that my old coworker Cam probably ate more of these foods than anyone else did. The overarching theme of Dan's song of Ina Garten hatred is not the actual taste of the finished product but more how asinine he finds that particular recipe to be. So here you are, Dan's bottom ten.
#1: Butternut Squash Soup
#1: Butternut Squash Soup
You guys asked for my top ten from the blog, so here we go! And I'm thinking that what you *really* want is actually the bottom ten, so I'll go ahead and give you those next week. That post will probably be A LOT funnier. While preparing to write this post, I had Dan flip through the cookbook to give me HIS top ten and he was all disgruntled as he did so and only came up with eight that he even liked at all. "I'm not a picky eater!" he insists. Yeah ok. Although to be fair, I've seen some cookbooks I would only make, like, one thing out of and plenty I'd make nothing out of, though sometimes that's because I find the chef so annoying. @ the Pioneer Woman. I just don't trust someone who puts sour cream in spaghetti and then bakes it. Plus all her recipe intros are about, like, Ladd or Tadd or whatever the heck her husband's name is "coming in from the fields starving for dinner". If I came in from working in a field and you tried to give me sour cream spaghetti, I'd be like, "How about a hot pocket instead? Thx." Anyway, this is not Dan's blog so these are not his top ten. You can ask him which ones he liked, but you'll end up in a long convo about how much he hates Ina Garten. Anyway, these are not ranked or anything, they're just in order from the cookbook.
So with that, #1: Juice of a Few Flowers
So with that, #1: Juice of a Few Flowers
It was Sunday afternoon and I thought to myself, "What a perfect time to make jam!" I mean, how positively quaint: just sitting in my home in suburbia, finished with weekend chores, relaxing with some knitting...why not? Why not make some jam? I mean, obviously my afternoon-kitchen-activity was directed toward jam-making because it was next up in the book BUT whatever, I was kind of excited! Also, this is the last recipe in this book!!! I'm still in the process of deciding what I'll do now, so if there's something you'd like me to make and tell you about in my own fashion - you know, with lots of tangents and jokes - please do let me know! I'll likely continue to tackle Ina content, but may start including some recipe faves and/or foods people text me about a lot! I get a lot of cake questions, a LOT of frosting questions (because meringue buttercream is bae and I've got everyone in my social circles who eats my food on board), and a lot of fish questions. So look for more food to come, even though this is the last recipe in Back to Basics.
We went to Publix to ItemQuest for this and Dan said, "Don't we already have strawberries???" And I had to confess that I had eaten them all because it's honestly amazing how good fruit can be when it's 1) in season, 2) somewhat local, and 3) not ludicrously expensive. I'm about to travel home to Alaska for about a month, and it's going to put a real damper on my current fruit-snacking habits when I go into Fred Meyer for some strawbs and they're like, $7/lb and already trying to be moldy. Also needed blueberries (partly for the jam, mostly for the snax), one Granny Smith apple, and more superfine sugar. Publix had all of these things, plus about a million old people 'cause Sunday + Publix = Old People City.
We went to Publix to ItemQuest for this and Dan said, "Don't we already have strawberries???" And I had to confess that I had eaten them all because it's honestly amazing how good fruit can be when it's 1) in season, 2) somewhat local, and 3) not ludicrously expensive. I'm about to travel home to Alaska for about a month, and it's going to put a real damper on my current fruit-snacking habits when I go into Fred Meyer for some strawbs and they're like, $7/lb and already trying to be moldy. Also needed blueberries (partly for the jam, mostly for the snax), one Granny Smith apple, and more superfine sugar. Publix had all of these things, plus about a million old people 'cause Sunday + Publix = Old People City.
I was glad Ina gave me something easy for this week, because I was packing for Alaska and just *did not have the time* to mess with hunting lobsters or weird cheeses from the internet or whatever. ItemQuest was fairly straightforward, just took Dan a trip to the liquor store next to the Publix for some limoncello. I grabbed this particular lemon curd in the British aisle of Publix; I think last time an Ina recipe called for lemon curd I bought it from Trader Joe's and it was DISGUSTING. I mean, truly awful. I would like to recommend making your own lemon curd if you have the time and the inclination. Ina's lemon curd recipe is phenomenal and it is one thing for which I can say she is truly correct: homemade is BETTER and store-bought is not at all as good. The most beloved cupcakes I have ever made were filled with Ina's lemon curd, and had the lemon curd mixed into the meringue buttercream frosting. HIGHLY RECOMMEND!!! Anyway, the rest of this was fruit that I had on hand, mint, and Greek yogurt which we did have to buy because I don't, as a rule, eat Greek yogurt of my own free will. It's chalky and disgusting.
Dates are something I honestly never even thought about until I did Whole 30. I have mentioned my Whole 30 experience several times over the course of this journey through Back to Basics, but if you're new to reading the blog, this is what happened: I did Whole 30 one time, just to prove that I could, because salvation-by-diet apologists were obsessed with it as the newest fad in righteous eating practices. It was a terrible experience; on top of hating every minute of it for myself and finding exactly zero wellness benefits, I also hated it for Dan who was not allowed to eat popcorn for 30 days. Dan is in love with popcorn; his addiction to it is almost at the level of my addiction to coffee. He gets rage-y without it. But anyway, Whole 30 recipes are big into dates as sweeteners and some of the things you can eat, like Lara Bars, are made with dates. Dates are impossibly chewy. I ate more of them in that 30 days than I ever wanted to, and now when I see them in recipes I can't help but think of that Whole 30. Fortunately for me, I got to begin this recipe by chopping TWO CUPS' worth of dates. Oh, they also kind of look like cockroach bodies, so there's that. The only thing I actually had to get at the store for this was oranges! I had everything else on hand, even Cointreau, thanks to many previous Ina recipes.
Alright so, I'm not the Muffin Man. I don't really make a whole lot of muffins, for a lot of reasons, one of the main ones being that on the rankings of breakfast foods they definitely do not crack the top five, maybe not even the top ten. If I have an option for a bagel or a waffle, I'll pick one of them over a muffin every single time. I also prefer cereal, cinnamon rolls, or *cue eye roll* avocado toast. I've just never risen from my slumber and been like, "You know what would really hit the spot right now? A MUFFIN." But!!! In recent months, since my friend Logan came into my life, I've been making muffins a lot more frequently because he really loves them. So the last blueberry muffins I made were from a 99cent Betty Crocker mix packet which he brought into my house and asked me sweetly to make, because they're what he grew up with and along with many preservatives, they are full of nostalgia for him. Here is Logan and me, preparing to mix the muffin batter. Out of respect (and to make up for the disrespect of rolling up with muffin mix), he wore one of my aprons. I will treasure this picture forever.
You guys...Ina has "a thing" about commercial granola bars. Her beef with them, apparently, is that they say they contain real fruit and nuts but that all she sees when she looks at the labels are like, ten different kinds of corn syrup. I'm going to go ahead and guess, just based on this, that none of the lunches her mom packed for her growing up contained any Fruit By the Foot. And surely if we introduced her to Gushers, she would die. This is a real shame. I also feel like this disdain for corn syrup is maybe just a tad self-righteous, coming from the woman whose frosting recipe calls for literally six entire sticks of butter. At that point, what's a little corn syrup to you really? People's nutritional hills-to-die-on really fascinate me (and also kind of annoy me sometimes) and the ones about sugar might get me the most. I feel like, at some point, sugar is sugar and whether you're baking with honey, white sugar, brown sugar, molasses, maple syrup, etc you're still probably making something that's not amazing for you so, in terms of sugar, why not just be in for a penny in for a pound, amirite? So while I'm on this topic, before I even get to the actual point (please, I know you're here for the tangents), I would like to just let anyone and everyone know that I'm absolutely not interested in your "healthy substitutes" for things that taste good in their original form. I do not WANT a chocolate chip pancake made out of bananas and grains you harvested in your field this morning. If I want a banana I will eat one, and if I want a chocolate chip pancake I will eat one, and that's that. And DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT come @ me with "cashew cheese". Just don't. I don't even think I should honor that concept with an explanation of why it's so wrong. If that's not self-evident, I can't help you.
So down to the granola bar ingredients. I rolled up to Kroger only to find that their already meager bulk bins had been EMPTIED because if you scoop dates into a bag and then someone else scoops dates into a bag, you might get the coronavirus. I'm glad they've taken the precaution of removing this shopping option, since I cannot resisting licking my hands after every grocery trip I make. Thankfully, they still had the lil tower of small containers of some of the weirder items right there in the organic section, which was where I was able to find dates. The rest of this stuff was on the baking aisle, with the exception of wheat germ which was, for some reason, with the cereal. I'm still kind of unclear on what wheat germ is actually used for by people, and the context of it being located on the cereal aisle makes me wonder even more. Do people eat it like grape nuts? Sprinkle it on stuff like how people like to do with nutritional yeast right now? ("It tastes just like cheese!" You know what else tastes like cheese? Actual cheese. You're welcome.) Anyway, I was very grateful that Kroger at least had everything I needed and I didn't have to go on a for real ItemQuest.
So down to the granola bar ingredients. I rolled up to Kroger only to find that their already meager bulk bins had been EMPTIED because if you scoop dates into a bag and then someone else scoops dates into a bag, you might get the coronavirus. I'm glad they've taken the precaution of removing this shopping option, since I cannot resisting licking my hands after every grocery trip I make. Thankfully, they still had the lil tower of small containers of some of the weirder items right there in the organic section, which was where I was able to find dates. The rest of this stuff was on the baking aisle, with the exception of wheat germ which was, for some reason, with the cereal. I'm still kind of unclear on what wheat germ is actually used for by people, and the context of it being located on the cereal aisle makes me wonder even more. Do people eat it like grape nuts? Sprinkle it on stuff like how people like to do with nutritional yeast right now? ("It tastes just like cheese!" You know what else tastes like cheese? Actual cheese. You're welcome.) Anyway, I was very grateful that Kroger at least had everything I needed and I didn't have to go on a for real ItemQuest.
At first I saw the pictures of this and thought, "YAY!!! Cinnamon rolls!" And then a couple of weeks ago, I actually tried making cinnamon rolls for the first time and realized that my inability to roll/shape/slice yeast doughs is still a thing. AND THEN I read this entire recipe and realized these get filled with raisins. So here we go!
ItemQuest was only dramatic because the stores just DID NOT have puff pastry sheets; I was only finding it in "shells". I tried Bi-Lo and Dan tried Food Lion before he finally located sheets at Publix. The rest of the ingredients, I already had on hand!
ItemQuest was only dramatic because the stores just DID NOT have puff pastry sheets; I was only finding it in "shells". I tried Bi-Lo and Dan tried Food Lion before he finally located sheets at Publix. The rest of the ingredients, I already had on hand!