Category Archives: Food

Pioneer Woman’s Perfect Pot Roast for an icy afternoon

Food, ,

I finally made my rounds of the folks whose blogs I read and saw a couple of posts about food. Apparently Mali suggested we post a favorite recipe or two and IB did just that. I have some recipes here and there, but I’ll post my favorite pot roast recipe here. It is not a foodie kinda meal, but it is warming on a day full of snow and ice like today. What I like best about this meal is that you make it early and leave it in the oven for 3 to 5 hours.

I don’t know how I first found out about the Pioneer Woman, but I’d already cooked many of her meals, bought her cookbook and seen her at a distance at the National Book Festival when I caught her on television making a pot roast. I don’t watch morning television, but I happened to be watching it the day she was on one of the morning network shows. She has since gotten her own television program — that I have yet to see.

I follow the directions exactly — except I use a cast iron Dutch oven to cook it in.

Pioneer Woman’s Perfect Pot Roast Recipe

Ingredients

1 whole (4 To 5 Pounds) Chuck Roast
2 Tablespoons Olive Oil
2 whole Onions
6 whole Carrots (Up To 8 Carrots)
Salt To Taste
Pepper To Taste
1 cup Red Wine (optional, You Can Use Beef Broth Instead)
2 cups To 3 Cups Beef Stock
3 sprigs Fresh Thyme, or more to taste
3 sprigs Fresh Rosemary, or more to taste

Preparation Instructions

First and foremost, choose a nicely marbled piece of meat. This will enhance the flavor of your pot roast like nothing else. Generously salt and pepper your chuck roast.

Heat a large pot or Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Then add 2 to 3 tablespoons of olive oil (or you can do a butter/olive oil split).

Cut two onions in half and cut 6 to 8 carrots into 2-inch slices (you can peel them, but you don’t have to). When the oil in the pot is very hot (but not smoking), add in the halved onions, browning them on one side and then the other. Remove the onions to a plate.
Throw the carrots into the same very hot pan and toss them around a bit until slightly browned, about a minute or so.

If needed, add a bit more olive oil to the very hot pan. Place the meat in the pan and sear it for about a minute on all sides until it is nice and brown all over. Remove the roast to a plate.

With the burner still on high, use either red wine or beef broth (about 1 cup) to deglaze the pan, scraping the bottom with a whisk to get all of that wonderful flavor up.
When the bottom of the pan is sufficiently deglazed, place the roast back into the pan and add enough beef stock to cover the meat halfway (about 2 to 3 cups). Add in the onion and the carrots, as well as 3 or 4 sprigs of fresh rosemary and about 3 sprigs of fresh thyme.

Put the lid on, then roast in a 275F oven for 3 hours (for a 3-pound roast). For a 4 to 5-pound roast, plan on 4 hours.

I serve this with mashed potatoes, but noodles would be good too. Tonight I am adding a turnip to the mashed potatoes just because I have one that needs to be used.

The original recipe is here with photos and detailed directions. You can also print a PDF of it here.

Blue Apron — a great idea that needs some work

Food

One of my most dreaded weekly tasks is planning and buying food for daily meals. It was worse when the kids were home, but even now, with just the two of us, planning meals is a pain. I usually end up just buying the same things and cooking the same things week after week. Some sort of pasta meal, some sort of Tex-Mex meal, some sort of casserole, etc. If Dean feels like cooking we either have something grilled or something fried.

Then I heard about Blue Apron. I may have seen an ad on Facebook and checked it out or maybe I saw an ad somewhere else, but either way, I really wanted to try the service. If you’re not familiar with Blue Apron — it is a fairly new (about two years old) company out of Brooklyn, NY that sends you all the ingredients and recipes for three unusual meals each week. All you need are salt, pepper and oil. What got me to finally subscribe to Blue Apron was a sponsored blog post on Amalah where the funniest blogger in the world talked about how delicious the meals were and how her kids and foodie husband loved them.

I was so excited about my first shipment that I think I checked the Blue Apron website several times an hour each day before my first blue and white box arrived. Dean was okay with it — but skeptical. Our first three meals were Chicken Hiyashi Chuka, Seared Cod Piperade and Peperonata & Fried Eggs. We liked the first two (Dean loved the cod) but the peperonata and eggs were served over homemade polenta that could have cooked longer.

We continued to get shipments and I continued to be excited about each box and talked it up to friends and family until the week of the Blue Apron typo. I was not terribly excited about the Crispy Fish Sandwiches with cole slaw and homemade tartar sauce, but decided to give it a go anyway. When I saw that it called for 1 tablespoon of salt to be added to the shredded cabbage I knew that was too much, but thought it was to extract the liquid from the cabbage and would be rinsed out. By the time I got to the step where I would have rinsed the salt from the cabbage I guess I forgot and just went with the recipe. As you can imagine the slaw was ruined. I read reviews about the dish and saw several complaining about the salt.

About the same time I’d sent Clare a couple of weeks of Blue Apron for a gift. The first week she was excited but didn’t like the food she made and thought it was too much work and made too much of a mess in her small kitchen. The second week she was sent meat instead of vegetarian recipes. (her fault, she didn’t check the vegetarian option this time) To their credit, Blue Apron sent her a couple free weeks of food because the first package was delivered a day late and because the second contained meat.

Since we were visiting Clare the week after the salty slaw meal we figured we could re-purpose the meat she was sent and maybe make one of her meals at a cabin we were renting on the Olympic Peninsula. The meat looked a little iffy, so we tossed it (Clare was not sure how long it was not refrigerated) but Clare and I made a very good and unusual pizza from one of their recipes that had been delivered.

The day before we left for Maryland, Clare got yet another Blue Apron delivery so we decided to make everything in the box in one meal and invite Clare’s roommate, Bennett, to have a vegetarian feast with us.

The meal began with a Moroccan-Spiced Heirloom Cauliflower Salad, continued with White Chili and ended with a Cauliflower and Kale casserole. Sounds okay, right? It was awful. But awful in a fun way since the four of us suffered through these dishes while sitting in the hallway of Clare’s amazing apartment building.

So back to Blue Apron — I think Blue Apron is a great idea. They have a wonderful help desk staffed with folks who seem genuinely interested in your happiness with the company. I don’t think I am the target audience for the company, however, since I’ve been cooking for decades and can probably come up with recipes as good or better then their best recipes. Their best recipes are very good but they also have a few duds. Of course it is a matter of opinion. What I like is different from what someone else likes (seen much of the time in my reaction to the meals versus what Dean thought about them).

I am not stopping my subscription — in fact I am getting a delivery the week of December 15 when I will be making Gnocchi with Sausage and Savoy Cabbage, Roasted & Stewed Chicken with Potato Latkes & Crème Fraîche and Macadamia-Crusted Cod with Forbidden Rice, Golden Beet & Avocado Salad. Dean won’t be pleased with the chicken, but hopefully he will like the gnocchi and cod.

If you do plan on trying Blue Apron make sure you check for comments on the recipes (at the bottom under “Tips for Home Chefs”) before you start cooking. Had I done that with the coleslaw recipe I would never have added a tablespoon of salt.

 

A pumpkiny experiment

Food

cone-shaped sieveMany years ago, back when I still lived with my parents. Back when I was still in love with an Englishman. Back before I’d ever heard of a food processor I decided to make pumpkin pie from an actual pumpkin. Back then I imagine we made our pumpkin pies from canned pumpkin pie filling (the sweetened kind — not the pumpkin puree). I really don’t know because I have never been a real fan of pumpkin pie. Which is why this is so confusing — me making a pumpkin pie from a pumpkin.

stringy pumpkinThe only thing I actually remember about making the pie was putting the pumpkin through a cone-shaped sieve on tall legs. I remember using a wooden pestle and smushing the cooked pumpkin through the holes in the sieve. I do sort of vaguely remember presenting Jeremy with the pie, but it doesn’t logistically make sense since Jeremy only ever visited in the summer — before pumpkins were for sale.

A few years ago I helped my mom go through her Wisconsin lake house kitchen. She wanted to donate some stuff that she never used. During the kitchen cleaning we came across a cone-shaped sieve with a wooden pestle. I asked if I could have it because I remembered making that pie. She said I could take it home.

the sieve at workOnce at home I put the cone-shaped sieve and wooden pestle away and forgot I had it for the most part, but when pumpkin season came around I wanted to buy a pumpkin, cook it and put it through the sieve like I did so many years ago. I didn’t even get to the sieve part because during baking the Pyrex casserole dish on which I’d placed the pumpkin halves exploded in my oven.

It took me seven years to work up the nerve to try again and I nearly forgot to use the sieve. I found a recipe for pumpkin puree on line (okay 2,270,000 recipes) and proceeded to roast the pumpkin (no Pyrex exploded in this episode), put it through the food processor, then measure it into Ziploc bags. I was about to fill the second bag when I noticed little white bits in the puree. I didn’t want stringy pumpkin pie. Then the light bulb came on. The sieve!

stringless pumpkinI put the remaining puree through the sieve (after cleaning it well — it had been collecting dust for the past 7 years after all — and was amazed at the lack of strings. I finished the puree this way and now have 14 cups of stringless pumpkin puree in the freezer.

I still do not like pumpkin pie — but the rest of the family does — so perhaps this will be a success. I don’t know when, if ever, I will use the sieve and pestle again, but I am glad I remembered it for this task.

And no, I still have not made anything from the puree.