(crock) pot roast

2.4 lbs of chuck roast, rubbed with garlic powder, salt (not kosher salt, we didn't have any), pepper

browned on both sides in a hot cast iron pan (heated it up, then put in a good amount of coconut oil. Almost burnt on one side really.

1 medium onion, sliced about in 8ths, on the bottom of a preheated 6-qt crock pot on low.

chuck roast into pan. ~4 sliced carrots, 2 small sliced peeled potatoes (because they weren't in good shape, the peels were icky), 1 stalk of celery, another sliced onion place around it.

deglazed the pan with a bit over a 1/2 cup of mushroom stock (it's what I had), dumped that over the meat in the crockpot. Added two sprigs of fresh rosemary from outside because why not.

Covered. we'll see what's up in ~8 hours...I've never done anything like this before.

VERDICT: 8-9 hours later...it smells and tastes awesome and the meat seems tender. The chunk I picked off was tasty.

Also I did not know there was a string around the whole piece of meat...whoops. But I assume it was food-safe/heat-safe string. 

I definitely need to make this more often. Next I'd like to experiment with whether I can put more vegetables in without compromising anything. Because oh man, carrots and potatoes cooked with beef are tasty.

Adventures with Steak

I'm still relatively (~2009) new to eating red meat, and because I try to only buy decently-sourced stuff, most of the meat I've eaten since then has been in the form of hamburgers. (Ground beef is the only grass-fed my budget allows, generally.) I've been trying to branch out a bit, though, and for me that will probably mean some inexpensive cuts of  "level 4" beef from Whole Foods.

Today I bought two relatively thin (1cm?) pieces of "outside bottom round steak" which I understand can be kind of tough. I trimmed some of the (fat? gristle? can't quite tell), stabbed both sides of it with a fork many many times, and dumped it into a mixture of balsamic vinegar, canola oil, chopped garlic, ground pepper, and some fancy whole-grain mustard that was in our fridge. It wasn't that much liquid--I didn't want to waste a bunch of balsamic vinegar. Honestly, I'm never sure what to use to make up volume in marinades. Oil? Water? Neither of these really makes sense, and I don't want to use gallons of balsamic vinegar or whatnot. Anyway. I am going to let it sit in that perhaps overnight, turning it at least once, and then cook it on top of the stove in a cast iron skillet.

In other meat news, ground turkey is gross, chili made from ground turkey is gross, and it is especially so when your source of ground turkey is a defrosted Trader Joe's turkey burger.  I rarely make something I can't bear to eat, but this fit into that category - and it was definitely the turkey, not the rest of the chili. I wish I hadn't wasted the onions, beans, and tomatoes on it, because those alone could have actually been tasty.

VERDICT: it wasn't actually that great--it felt a little tough and the balsamic flavor was too strong--it's a nice flavor but I want to taste meat.. For the second piece, I pierced it more times with a fork, seasoned only with salt and pepper, didn't marinate at all, and didn't cook for as long. It was better.

stew

Nothing fancy here, but I had never made stew with meat in it before so I want to keep track of what I used. (Almost twenty years of almost-vegetarianism will do that to you.) I think this has a lower meat:vegetable ratio than most, but I figure that if I can make stew with no meat, I can make stew with less meat than you're supposed to...whatever "supposed to" means, anyway.

5 stalks of celery (I think)
5 carrots
4 onions
1 turnip
8oz mushrooms
3 cloves of garlic
1 lb stew beef
1 6-oz can tomato paste
1 15-oz can diced tomatoes
4 smallish potatoes

maybe 2 TBS thyme (dried)
maybe 2 TBS paprika
salt
pepper
1 bay leaf
some dried rosemary (less than 1 TBS)

I used an 11-quart stockpot, which had lots of extra space in it. Cut up and sauteed everything except tomato stuff, beef, garlic and potatoes for a bit, then added those and sauteed a bit more, then water. Cooked slowly for a long time...at least an hour, maybe more like two? The meat seems tender enough.