Slow-cooker pot roast

There must be a myriad of ways to cook a pot roast and when looking up different recipes I find the variations are pretty close. There always is the meat, a variety of vegetables, some liquid, and seasoning. It is rather easy to make a wonderful pot roast on the stove top or by combining stove top browning followed by slower oven roasting. The whole process will take a few hours. Even though the roast can be left alone to cook for most of the time, I usually feel that I can't leave the house with the oven on.

Using a slow cooker to finish a pot roast meal might be just the right answer when you have to be away from home most of the day. I have to admit that I have never been truly impressed with the quality of taste of slow cooker meals. Somehow, many dishes I've tried had this distinct "crockpot taste." The only two dishes I've ever been happy with from the crockpot is a split pea soup that I've been making since I got married and a recipe for French dip sandwich meat that I got from a church cookbook. Other than that I've been rather disappointed by many meals.

There are days, however, when the kids come home after swim practice or an afternoon of piano lessons and are so famished that it's nice to have dinner already prepared. So I will begin a challenge for myself to use one day a week, the day I'm pretty much gone all day, and use the slow cooker to work on dishes that taste like gourmet food. Is there such a thing as gourmet crockpot food? We'll see what I can do to liven up the fare to keep my finicky taste buds happy. Today I will begin with a pot roast.

Ingredients:

1 Tbsp. canola oil

3-4 lbs. beef chuck

1 large sweet onion, coarsely chopped

2-3 carrots, peeled and cut into 1-inch chunks

2-3 garlic cloves, minced

3/4 cup dry white wine

salt & pepper

Preparation:

Heat 1 Tbsp. canola oil in a large pan and brown meat over medium-high heat, about 5 minutes per side or until nicely browned.

Meanwhile, peel and chop onion and carrots, and mince garlic. Place all the vegetables in the bottom of the slow cooker.

When the meat is browned, remove it from the pan and generously sprinkle each side with salt and pepper. Place on top of the vegetables in the slow cooker.

Deglaze the pan with 3/4 cup of dry white wine until all the browned drippings from the pan are dissolved and pour all of the liquid into the slow cooker.

Turn slow cooker to high and cook for 4-6 hours until the meat is tender. The roast can also be cooked on low for 8-10 hours.

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.