A Roast That's Actually A Roast

I'm one of those strange people that love winter.  I was never happy in Las Vegas with its brutal heat and wind - give me a nice Pennsylvania winter anytime.  So it was nice when we woke up yesterday morning to this:

It's our second snowfall of the year (the first was a few days before Halloween!), and I love the beauty of it.  I didn't even mind cleaning off the car when I had to run to the store - though I'm sure that will get old (last year I got to park in the garage - this year not sure that'll happen).   I also love that this time of year brings thoughts of comfort food - and food that you don't mind spending hours cooking.  This week the grocery store had a roast on sale and I decided to tackle it.

Now, my normal way of cooking a roast is in the crockpot.  I've tried several recipes for it but really, none of them I would consider a roast.  You know, that you could slice thin if you were talented enough - the kind that you can slice without it falling into many stringy pieces?  Well, I think I found what I was looking for.

The best part?  It's easy, easy, easy.  I found it on Allrecipes here. After reading the reviews, I decided to alter the cooking a little and I think it came out good that way.  Here's it right out of the oven:

I preheated the oven to 500 and rubbed the meat with Montreal steak seasoning.  Placed it in the dish and roasted it at 500 for 24 minutes.  Then turned the heat down to 170 and let it cook for 2 1/2 hours without opening the oven.  The original recipe said to turn the heat off but I was worried because some of the reviews said it didn't get cooked all the way and I wasn't going to not have dinner!  You can see there were some juices in the bottom of the pan that I just spooned over our slices - but you could easily make a wonderful gravy out of it.

I served it with roasted baby potatoes and carrots (toss with a little olive oil and more steak seasoning, roast in the oven at 400 for about 40 minutes) - I have a toaster oven I used for this - worked out great.

Now see those slices?  Much better looking than the chunks of meat coming out of the crockpot.  Now, in all fairness, I do like those chunks of meat sometimes, but this is what I think of when I think roast.

How do you cook your roasts? Any tricks you possess to get it "roasty"?

Comments

[paula]

I've done it both ways.

I usually do turn the oven off (after the initial high heat roasting) if I do it in the oven because I like my meat pretty rare.

In the crockpot, you don't get rare but hopefully you get tender. I have done roasts like this one in the crockpot ( http://cookbookjunkie.blogspot.com/2006/03/perfect-pot-roast.html) with good results but I usually reserve the crockpot for chuck roasts. I prefer the oven method for this type of cut. Again, so I can cook it rare.

[Alisha]

Thanks, Paula ... I tried to click on the link, but it wasn't there :(

[paula]

http://cookbookjunkie.blogspot.com/2006/03/perfect-pot-roast.html

The closing parenthesis got tangled in with the link above.