Who Do You Love and pot roast on the fly
I’m just twenty-two and I don’t mind dying
Who do you love
Who do you love
Who do you love
Tonight, Greg Maddux takes the mound against San Diego. The Dodgers are now in first place. Who do I love?
Good question.
Anyway! Yesterday, after two baseball games and soccer opening day, three family members (including me) sick with a hi, this is preschool! cold, one loud, embarrassing toddler hissy fit in everyone-I-know public, all endured during one hundred degree heat, I wasn’t eaxctly ready for the dinner party I had planned for Sunday evening.
But I had a three and a half pound roast that needed to be cooked. I had fresh spinach waiting to be vinaigretted, red bell peppers to be grilled, couscous waiting for diced tomatoes and lemon juice.
“Just come over at 5, we’ll go out to eat, then come back here and the kids can play the Wii,” I said to Carolyn, my amiga of 22 years. Carolyn, poor baby, is suffering from a terrible Wii addiction and had planned to bring it over to my house for dinner, unable to part with it. Carolyn’s birthday was last month and due to the over-scheduling of lives, we talk every other day but don’t see each other as often as we should.
So as soon as Carolyn and I had a workable plan, I got my kids - my hot, sweaty, been at the field all day, worked over kids - into the bath and made the all important call ahead seating communication by phone.
The roast sat on my counter, the healthy red color of the meat starting to fade. My frugal, maternal self - though beaten down a little with a cold and sun/child exhaustion - sprung into action at the thought of waste. That and leftover roast beef, I love leftover roast beef, it’s September food.
A fight ensuing in the bathtub over I don’t know what because I blocked it out, my husband running around the house whining about the Chargers game, I took the roast lovingly into both hands (yep, I’m twisted) and laid it into a roasting pan. I dusted it with coarse grain salt, dried oregano, and black pepper. I poured over A1, Worchestshire sauce, balsamic vinegar and olive oil. Between all of the pot roast recipes I’d read over the last three days as I waited for an opportunity to cook this roast, I combined all of said recipes and cooked it in a way I hoped would work.
I didn’t flour and brown it in oil, like foodtv.com suggested. I didn’t cook it for many, many hours like epicurious.com talked about. The most I did was chop up two stalks of on the softer side celery and half a red onion, and add them towards the end.
And I preheated the oven to 225 degrees, a temperateure right in between what all of the recipes listed.
I set the timer for 3 hours, figuring we’d be home before cooking time ran out. We made it by 15 minutes.
While the roast cooked, I, happily dining out, enjoyed heavy on anchovy Caesar, Malbec, and wood-fired goat cheese pizza with rosemary and red onion. I took a bite out of Carolyn’s birthday sundae. I drank a lot of water to rehydrate, and flush the cold. My kids and Carolyn’s chased each other around the table at dinner.
By the third child, though, and on my best day, I can deflect daggers. Life is too busy and short to be bothered with such things.
When we got home, the house smelled like roasted beef and piquant pan gravy. I took the foil off the roast as Carolyn set up the Wii, a look on her face I hadn’t seen since we were seventeen.
I’ll never grow up never grow up never grow up-Up not me
Then Carolyn said “Just one game per kid, and we’re leaving, Sam is done for the day.” Don’t you love a friend who knows you well, and will speak up for you when your mouth is full of food, denial, or pride?
When we got to bed, though, I couldn’t fall asleep. Maybe some of those daggers permeated my shield, rattled the game that I talk, maybe I was still hungry, maybe the cold medicine made me restless.
No, I admit this, I’m always restless. Since I was up late, I committed to memory the recipe I haphazardly created. I mentally wrote down how I cooked that roast beef because juicy it was, tender it promised to stay, and biting into that celery that surprisingly kept it’s texture, I tasted a seductive flavor of fall. Almost as if I had used poultry seasoning.
Here is pot roast on the fly…let me give you a garlic bread recipe to eat along with it. You need something to absorb the pan juices.
POT ROAST trust yourself
3 1/2 pound round top roast
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
1/4 cup A1
1/4 cup Worchestshire sauce
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
2+ stalks celery, diced
1/2 red onion, sliced
dried oregano to taste
coarse grain salt and pepper to taste
Preheat oven to 225 degrees. Pour over roast: olive oil, A1, Worchestshire, and balsamic. Sprinkle over the roast: oregano, salt, pepper.
Slow roast for up to 3 hours, the internal temp on the roast I cooked was 140 degrees when removed from the oven. Let it rest 20 minutes before cutting, if you can wait.
GARLIC BREAD
1 french bread, sliced lengthwise
6 garlic cloves
1 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
1 tbsp. butter, room temp
1/2 tsp. coarse grain salt
handful shredded parmesan cheese
optional: parsley flakes or chopped fresh parsley
smoked paprika if you like that reddish color on the garlic bread
note: I often double this, because sometimes I like my bread with extra garlic cheese topping, or I plan to use it in pasta the next day.
Preheat the broiler.
Pulse garlic, olive oil, butter salt and parmesan together in food processor. (If you don’t have a food processor, mince the garlic as fine as you can get it, then add olive oil, salt and parmesan to garlic in a bowl until you get a thick, spreadable consistency.) Pause the pulsing and look at the mixture. If it’s too thick, add more olive oil.
When the mixture is all blended and spreadable, add either fresh chopped parsley or dried parsley flakes, if you like.
Spread garlic/butter/cheese/ parsley mixture over lenghwise sliced bread.
Sprinkle on some paprika if you want.
Put under broiler for about four minutes - check after three. I usually stand beside the oven while this broils. It burns fast, and to burn scratch garlic bread…what a waste.
