For the Love of Pot Roast
As I mentioned earlier, we went on our first real grocery shopping trip last Friday. While we were there, I told her we should get a pot roast for Sunday dinner. I don't mean to brag, but I make a pretty good Crock Pot roast with potatoes, carrots, onions, yams or sweet potatoes, and various spices. (It's easy: just put everything in the pot on a Sunday morning, and by the time you get home from church on Sunday afternoon, it's ready to eat. So easy, even a bachelor can do it. Every man should own a Crock Pot.) Anyway, we bought a pork shoulder roast and all the veggies to go with it.
So Sunday morning rolled around, and I started getting things ready. I peeled and washed the potatoes and the yam. I layered the baby carrots and the potatoes at the bottom of the pot. Then I opened the roast.
It was bad. Not bad as in, "Wow, this roast is a little past its prime," but bad as in, "Merciful heavens, I didn't think meat could even be this color."† It was only bad on the bottom, so there was no way to know it was bad until I actually opened to package. Once I did, though, it was obvious that there was a problem before I even took the roast out. So I slapped the offending roast into a big plastic bag, along with the price tag from the original package, and put it into the freezer. I also put the chopped veggies into plastic bags so I could use them with the replacement roast that we were certainly going to get from the store.
After our chiropractic visit on Monday morning, we took the roast back to the store. When the customer service lady asked what she could do for us, I put the still-frozen roast, bad side up, on the counter and said, "We need to return this roast. It's somewhat discolored." Her response was a bit more succinct: "That looks bad." So she gave us a full refund, and we made our way back to the meat section.
After just a couple of minutes, we found a nice beef roast as a replacement. We were able to verify the condition of this roast before buying it, so we felt pretty good about that. We took it home, I got the veggies out of the fridge, and in about 20 minutes, the cooking of Monday night's dinner was underway.
Until the power went out, that is.
We've noticed that the power occasionally flickers here at the new place. We'll get home some nights to find the VCR flashing, that sort of thing. But Monday was the first time we'd actually been home for it. We waited for a little while, but the power didn't come back on. So I went upstairs to ask the landlady about it. She said that the power did go out from time to time—but only on our side of the street. What the...? She said she'd call to see what was going on. Sure enough, a few minutes later, she called back to say we'd lost power, but only on our side of the street. The rest of the neighborhood was fine.
We'd been powered down for about an hour at this point, and the Crock Pot was starting to get cold. So I called my old roommate, who lives just a couple of blocks away, to ask if they had power. They did, and he said it'd be okay for us to come over and plug in our dinner until the electricity came back on or until it was done cooking. So I returned to the old house and plugged it in. Then we went to run a few errands, including some school/financial aid stuff (more on which later). We called the landlord about 7:30, and he told us they had just restored power a few minutes before. So we went back home, with a short detour to get our roast, and had dinner.
And I have to tell you, the roast was good. Really good, in fact. It was tasty and moist, moreso than I can usually manage. Nancy was impressed. It makes me wonder if I should turn the Crock Pot off for an hour and a half every time I make a roast....
--
† I can't prove it, but I think it may have been an incident like this that drove Diliwag to vegetarianism.
So Sunday morning rolled around, and I started getting things ready. I peeled and washed the potatoes and the yam. I layered the baby carrots and the potatoes at the bottom of the pot. Then I opened the roast.
It was bad. Not bad as in, "Wow, this roast is a little past its prime," but bad as in, "Merciful heavens, I didn't think meat could even be this color."† It was only bad on the bottom, so there was no way to know it was bad until I actually opened to package. Once I did, though, it was obvious that there was a problem before I even took the roast out. So I slapped the offending roast into a big plastic bag, along with the price tag from the original package, and put it into the freezer. I also put the chopped veggies into plastic bags so I could use them with the replacement roast that we were certainly going to get from the store.
After our chiropractic visit on Monday morning, we took the roast back to the store. When the customer service lady asked what she could do for us, I put the still-frozen roast, bad side up, on the counter and said, "We need to return this roast. It's somewhat discolored." Her response was a bit more succinct: "That looks bad." So she gave us a full refund, and we made our way back to the meat section.
After just a couple of minutes, we found a nice beef roast as a replacement. We were able to verify the condition of this roast before buying it, so we felt pretty good about that. We took it home, I got the veggies out of the fridge, and in about 20 minutes, the cooking of Monday night's dinner was underway.
Until the power went out, that is.
We've noticed that the power occasionally flickers here at the new place. We'll get home some nights to find the VCR flashing, that sort of thing. But Monday was the first time we'd actually been home for it. We waited for a little while, but the power didn't come back on. So I went upstairs to ask the landlady about it. She said that the power did go out from time to time—but only on our side of the street. What the...? She said she'd call to see what was going on. Sure enough, a few minutes later, she called back to say we'd lost power, but only on our side of the street. The rest of the neighborhood was fine.
We'd been powered down for about an hour at this point, and the Crock Pot was starting to get cold. So I called my old roommate, who lives just a couple of blocks away, to ask if they had power. They did, and he said it'd be okay for us to come over and plug in our dinner until the electricity came back on or until it was done cooking. So I returned to the old house and plugged it in. Then we went to run a few errands, including some school/financial aid stuff (more on which later). We called the landlord about 7:30, and he told us they had just restored power a few minutes before. So we went back home, with a short detour to get our roast, and had dinner.
And I have to tell you, the roast was good. Really good, in fact. It was tasty and moist, moreso than I can usually manage. Nancy was impressed. It makes me wonder if I should turn the Crock Pot off for an hour and a half every time I make a roast....
--
† I can't prove it, but I think it may have been an incident like this that drove Diliwag to vegetarianism.
posted by Michael at
3:03 PM
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