Cub had boneless chuck roasts on sale this week – a BOGO offer.  I bought two, one for an upcoming meal and one for the freezer.  They were about 3-3/4 pounds each.

What we seem to like best about a pot roast are the carrots and, to a lesser degree, the potatoes.  I think I’ve finally got a bead on getting the carrots brown – the “trick” is to use a big roasting pan.  I used to have a large blue-black graniteware roasting pan and somewhere along the way I gave it to Becky in favor of a smaller pan for my house.  Several months ago I picked up another one for myself at Fleet Farm.  It’s nothing fancy, just the oval roasting pan with a matching cover.  It’s about 12” x 18”, I think and roomy enough to hold at least a pound of carrots, potatoes, onion, celery, and the beef roast.

A couple of my sisters braise their pot roasts on the stovetop; I’ve never had success doing that and bake mine.

Allow about 3 hours for making the roast (about 3-1/2 pounds or so). 

The first step is to heat the roasting pan on top of the stove, pour in a couple tablespoons of olive oil, then brown the roast on both sides, taking maybe 5 minutes per side to do that.  While the meat is browning, I can peel and prep the carrots, celery, and onion.  Peel lots of carrots, about twice as many as you think is reasonable.  I usually cut them in half and then cut the thicker bottom half in half lengthwise.  Peel and quarter a small onion, halve a couple celery ribs.

While the meat is browning, preheat the oven to 300°F.  When the meat has browned nicely on both sides, season it with some pepper and salt, maybe some garlic.  I peeled a couple fat cloves of garlic, slivered them, and stuck the cloves into slits I’d made in the roast — just like my mom used to do. 

Arrange the carrots around the perimeter of the roast and put the onion and celery on top.  Pour about a cup to a cup-and-a-half of water or beef broth on top, cover it with the pan lid and  slide it into the oven.  Leave it alone for two hours.  Don’t peek, okay?  After two hours, add a few peeled and quartered potatoes, red or white, no difference.  The reds will hold their shape a little better, I think. 

By the time you get to adding the potatoes, your house should smell wonderful.  When you add the potatoes, check to see that there is still some liquid in the pan (there will likely be more than what you started with).  If things look dry, add a cup of broth or water.  Cover again and continue to bake for 45 minutes or so.

The meat and the vegetables should be fork tender.  Remove them to a serving platter or serving bowls for the vegetables, covering with foil, and stick them in the microwave (don’t turn it on!) while you make the gravy.

Make a water and flour slurry (maybe 1/2 cup of water and 1/4 cup flour?) and slowly pour it into the boiling pan liquid, whisking to keep it from getting lumpy.  You might need to add more liquid and a touch of Kitchen Bouquet will darken the color.  Correct the seasoning, boil for a minute or so to cook the flour, then pour it into a gravy boat for table service.

Slice it up and serve it up.  Oh, the green beans on the plate?  Those are pickled green beans from a year or two ago, I think.  They were okay but would have been better in a bloody mary cocktail.  Too bad we don’t drink much.  I pitched the rest of them; no sense keeping them around to take up refrigerator space.

Once you’ve had the main meal from the roast, you have leftovers!  Yeay!!  You can simply slice the meat, heat it in some gravy, and set it atop a slice of bread for a hot beef sandwich; you can grind it with some onion and moisten it with mayo to make a nice sandwich spread; and you can make roast beast hash.  Hash is one of Rob’s favorite meals and a week after we had the roast the first time, I ran across that container that contained the rest of the meat, carrots, and potatoes.

For the hash, cut the cooked meat into approximately 1” pieces (aim for maybe a cup or so of cubed meat) and put it into the workbowl of your food processor.  Peel and cut an onion into sixths or eighths and put that into the bowl, too.  Pulse-process that combination about two or three times, then add some of the leftover carrots and potatoes from the roast.  Have the potatoes cut into maybe 1-1/2” pieces, the carrots in 2” pieces.  Pulse-process that whole mixture maybe three or four times.  Don’t overdo it or you’ll have a paste! 

Heat a bit of oil and butter in a large skillet (I use my non-stick skillet for making our hash) and dump the chopped mixture into it.  Spread it evenly over the bottom of the pan and brown it slowly on top of the stove -- depending on how hot the pan is, this may only take 5 minutes or so.

If you are as good at this as I am, deftly flip the whole hash patty at once (I do this over the sink in case things go south on me) and brown the other side for another 5-10 minutes.  (If you’re not so deft, turn it in sections to brown the second side.)

Divide it among two or three plates and enjoy.  Have some hot gravy ready to pour over the top if you like. 

We had a mixed green salad with this and called it dinner.  It was nice and crisp and very tasty, thank you.  Very tasty.