Classic Pot Roast

From the "All-Purpose Cookbook": Joy of Cooking! I love this cookbook. I googled this recipe so I might copy and paste the recipe (I cheat, I know), and didn't find it, but found a really cool blog that seems kinda similar to mine (as in lots of crazy pictures of each step): The Joy of the Joy of Cooking. Definitely gonna have to check that one out more later, I only glanced through.

So this recipe is for your basic pot roast, nothing extraordinary but very delicious and exactly what you want pot roast to be. You never know where inspiration is going to come from, and I got the idea to make this for dinner from the show Desperate Housewives last week; there were several references to pot roast and it sounded good to me!

Beef Pot Roast
from Joy of Cooking

3 to 4 lb chuck, shoulder, top or bottom round, brisket, blade or rump
Flour
2 T. vegetable oil
1 carrot
1 rib celery
1/4 cup chopped green pepper
1 small onion
2 cups vegetable stock or part stock and part dry red wine
1 bay leaf

Heat the vegetable oil in a large, heavy stockpot. Dredge the meat in flour and brown on all sides. Roughly chop the carrot, celery, green pepper and onion, and add to the pot when the meat is about halfway browned. When the meat is browned, spoon off excess fat and add the stock (or stock and wine) and bay leaf. Cover and bake 3-4 hours in a 300-325 degree oven, or simmer on the stove. During this time, turn the meat several times and, if necessary, add hot vegetable stock and salt and/or pepper.

I made this one day to have for dinner the next - I let the big pot cool a bit after cooking and then just stuck it in the fridge, and the next day I took out the meat and cut a few slices, just what we'd eat that night. I put the slices in a small saucepan with some juice from the large pot and heated it up on the stove.

I served it with little potatoes that I cut and roasted with olive oil, salt, pepper, lemon zest and rosemary. Usually I think of potatoes as something that takes a long time to cook, but I cut them small and under the broiler they took just a few minutes. Just enough time to heat up the pot roast.

I added a new tag called "DINNER" and will go back and add that to the appropriate recipes to make searching for dinner ideas easier on this blog.

Ribeyes and Pommes Anna

Steak and potatoes - what could be better! I don't have a grill, but a good seasoned cast iron skillet can work, once you've had some practice. At least for me, because it's impossible to have an exact recipe to follow when cooking steak and you must learn through practice how a steak looks, sounds, and feels when it's cooking properly, needs to be turned, and is finished to the desired doneness. These are the best guidelines I can provide:

Steak cooked in cast iron

1. great steaks are not cooked, they are bought. Buy the best quality steak you can.
2. remove the steak from the refrigerator well before cooking in order to let it come to room temperature. The time it needs depends on the thickness of the steak.
3. salt and pepper it well (and don't mess around with too many other spices), while it's sitting out. When you think it's been salted enough. salt it some more! Some live by the theory that you do not salt meat until just before cooking because it draws out the moisture - but my theory is that I want it to draw out some moisture from the very outside. Unless you marinade the steak with salt for several hours, the salt will not penetrate very deeply. This means that the steak will get that nice, dark brown, salty, delicious, crust on the outside, because it's not soggy. If the outside of the steak is not salted and the moisture not drawn out from the edges, you run the chance of steaming your steak! And by the time it's browned you've killed it on the inside.
4. set your cast iron skillet on HIGH heat and let it sit there for about ten minutes.
5. put a little vegetable oil in the skillet, then immedately throw in that steak.
6. don't touch it.
7. don't stick anything into it, like a fork. Check and flip it with a spatula or two, or tongs.
8. flip it over one time, and one time only.
9. after several minutes on one side, check the bottom to see if that side looks done. If so, flip it and don't touch it. Keep watching it, but resist the urge to poke it around.
10. when the bottom side is browned and you think it's almost done, take the steak out of the skillet and place in on a platter.
11. don't stick it with a fork or knife or anything yet!
12. put a nice pat of butter on the top, and put a piece of foil loosely over the platter.
13. now if you have a second steak, repeat the process but you don't need to add extra veg oil to the pan.
14. after the steak has rested for ten minutes or so, you may eat it!
15. if it's not well done enough, this is what I do (or if I'm sharing a steak with Erol, who likes it less well than I do): slice the steak and put the slices back into the very hot skillet for a few seconds on each side.

I served the steak with a kind of fake demi glace, which in it's true form is an intensely flavored brown meat glaze that is super complicated to make. I have no idea how I came up with this, I must have read something about this technique somewhere, but what I did was bought a carton of low-sodium beef stock that had the best ingredients list, knowing that I would reduce it and therefore concentrate the flavor. I put a couple of cups of the stock into a saucepan and set it on medium for an hour or so, until it reduced to about half a cup. Then I took about a tablespoon of flour and kneaded it into an equal amount of butter, and then slowly whisked that into the stock to thicken it further. I didn't really know what to expect, but it was SO good! If you try this, a low-sodium stock is a must, and use unsalted butter if possible, because even so it was pretty salty. This is the kind of sauce that you only need a tiny dab of because it's so flavorful and rich tasting.

We also had chopped garlic and parsley on our steak and potatoes. The raw garlic became almost spicy, and it was a nice addition.

Speaking of the potatoes - these are so simple and can be assembled and refrigerated ahead of time, then simply baked.

Pommes Anna
based on a recipe from Gourmet Magazine

1 1/2 pounds potatoes
1/2 stick butter

Preheat oven to 450. Brush the bottom of a 9 inch ovenproof skillet with butter and sprinkle generously with kosher salt (this will add flavor of course but also help the potatoes to come out of the pan after cooking).

Slice the potatoes very thin and put them in a large bowl of cold water. Drain the slices and pat them dry between paper towels.

Arrange the potato slices in the skillet, overlapping them slightly, in layers, brushing each layer with the melted butter and seasoning it with salt and pepper. Cover the layered potato slices with foil, and bake it for 30 minutes. Remove the foil and bake for 30 minutes, or until the potatoes are tender and golden. Invert the potato cake onto a cutting board or large platter and serve.

We ate like kings! Nobody can eat like this all the time, but we really enjoy it when we do. Especially when we had dessert: Chocolate Souffle!!