One More Pot Roast…

One more rainy day this week, perfect for one more little pot roast before summer beckons with lighter fare. At least that's what I thought today, realizing the pot roast my daughter Emily and I had bought at the grocer's a few days ago should be turned into a hearty dish no later than today.

Trying to keep the dish simple, I worked with what I had in the refrigerator and the pantry: onions, carrots, potatoes, salt and pepper, and … a little red wine.

Ingredients:

1 Tbsp. olive or canola oil

1 pot roast, 3-3.5 lbs.

2-4 cloves of garlic, minced

1 large sweet onion, cut into chunks

1/2 cup red wine

6 large carrots, peeled, sliced length-wise, and cut into 2-inch pieces

Preparation:

Season the roast with salt and pepper from all sides. Heat oil in a heavy pot, such as a Dutch oven, that can be placed into the oven if you decide to finish the roast in the oven rather than on the stovetop.

Brown roast from all sides for a few minutes. Remove roast from pot. Add cut up onion and garlic and place the roast on top of everything. Add red wine. Cover the pot with a lid and reduce the heat to a very low simmer. Simmer for about 3 1/2 hours, flipping the roast once. About 30-40 minutes before the end of the cooking time, add the carrots to the pot.

When the roast is done, remove and set aside on a cutting board and cover with foil. Remove the carrots and put into a bowl for serving. You can strain the gravy, but I decided to take a potato masher and mash the onions into the gravy. No thickening of the gravy was required.

Serve pot roast, carrots and gravy with boiled, salted potatoes. Yum. This was a good dish. Simple ingredients and no-fuss cooking produced a delicious, comforting dinner on a rainy day.

Homemade Hamburger Buns

I have a friend in Colorado who bakes bread for her family several times a week. She bakes bread for sandwiches and also makes her own homemade hamburger buns. What a luxury! It has never occurred to me to put in the amount of time to make my own buns for hamburgers, even though I love buns, rolls and other small breads.

When I was a kid, I loved eating dry hard rolls for a snack and I usually followed my own ritual: I'd bite off one end of the roll, take my fingers to dig out and eat the soft, chewy inside of the roll before munching the crust.

In any case, today we were planning buffalo burgers for dinner and with enough time on my hands, I thought I'd give making my own hamburger buns a try. As always, I let the breadmaker do the messy part of kneading and letting the dough rise once for me. The rest was a cinch and we all agreed when eating our burgers that these were the tastiest buns we've ever had.

Adapted from Bernard Clayton's New Complete Book of Breads.

Ingredients:

2 1/2 cups bread flour

2 1/4 tsp. active dry yeast

1 Tbsp. butter, softened at room temperature

1 cup hot water (120˚–130˚F)

Preparation:

Add all ingredients to the pan of a breadmaker, in the order suggested by the breadmaker manufacturer, and process on the dough setting. When the dough is done, turn it out onto a lightly floured work surface, divide into 6 pieces and shape them into balls. Put them onto a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper or a Silpat mat, cover with wax paper and let rest for about 5 minutes. Flatten each ball with the palm of your hand and let rest for another 30 minutes. Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 400˚F. Brush buns with a little milk and sprinkle either sesame or poppy seeds on top, if so desired. Then bake the buns on a center rack in the oven for about 20 minutes. They are done when nicely browned. Cool buns on a rack and serve.

Green Goodness

A few years ago I discovered how good green smoothies are and thought, what an easy way to ingest a lot of fresh, green vegetables. When I started making them, I only used fruit and spinach because drinking a green drink is a little bit of an acquired taste–at least for starters. Spinach actually tastes quite sweet compared to many other greens, so it is perfect to blend with fruit, making the combination very palatable to the "green smoothie novice." Over time, I started adding a few other things, such as a leaf of kale, collard greens, or a stalk of celery. These additions make a green smoothie taste a little more robust and–in the case of celery–even a bit salty. My husband likes them that way, but our kids prefer the "sweeter" version. Here's the recipe for a very simple green smoothie, just the way my daughter Emily likes it:

Ingredients:

1 mango

5 oz. baby spinach

1 1/2 to 2 cups water

Preparation:

Blend all ingredients in a blender until smooth and creamy. This makes about 2 large servings (12 oz. each or more).

Pretty Tasty All-Fruit Breakfast Smoothie

It's been very busy around here for the last couple of weeks and all I have time for today is record the recipe for a pretty tasty breakfast smoothie, dairy-free, that I whipped up in a jiffy this morning before dashing off to another appointment:

Dairy-free Breakfast Smoothie:

1 orange

1 banana

1 apple

6 oz. orange juice, ideally calcium-enriched and non-pulp

Mix all ingredients in a blender on high speed and serve. Makes about one 20-24 oz. single serving that'll fill you up till lunch-time.