Pot Roast!

It's one of my days off and I should be blissfully sleeping in, but apparently my body thought otherwise and awakened me at 5 am. Ugh. But this means I get a head start on blogging today!

Now that it's fall and supposedly getting cooler (yesterday being an anomaly, at 85 degrees), I start wanting warm, comforting foods -- pretty normal. Since I'm just barely easing out of this last round of tax hell, I'm not quite ready to get cooking as soon as I get home, but I'm also really sick of eating out and eating crap. Solution? Drag out our crockpot and actually try to use it more than once this year.

For some weird reason I've been craving pot roast recently. I don't know if it's because I'm just in the mood for big hunks of tender beef, or I've somehow associated it with fall and our crockpot, but there you go. Luckily Publix had chuck roast on sale this week and luckily there were plenty of recipes for pot roast. Now you'd think with my billion-plus cookbooks lying around, at least 2 of which are devoted to slow cookers, I'd start there. Nope. The problem was, I didn't know how reliable those recipes were. If I go somewhere like Recipezaar or Allrecipes then I can read the reviews and decide if I want to try a recipe. So what's the point of me being obsessive and buying cookbooks like crazy? Ummm, that's a very good question. But that's a post for another time.

So anyway, without too much hard work I found a few recipes that looked easy-peasy and had good reviews. I picked this one and went grocery shopping for ingredients.

And just to change things up a bit, I'm posting pics of my pot roast journey.

And of course, since I have to tweak recipes when I try them -- I used a 3-lb chuck roast, used 1 can of roasted garlic-flavored cream of mushroom soup, a can of beef broth, a packet of beefy onion soup, sprinklings of dry rosemary, and I added a ton o' veggies to the bottom of the crockpot.

The results? Very very meltingly tender beef. The flavor? Mehhh. But what do you expect when using canned condensed soup and an onion soup packet? It wasn't horrible, but it wasn't spectacular. For comfort food it was fine, but it just didn't have enough zip for me. I would say I would make it again, this time using a different recipe that didn't call for processed ingredients. But it also could be that this is just supposed to be a comfortingly bland dish and I'm just used to a spicier palate. Doesn't mean it's a bad recipe, just maybe not for me.