Beef: It's What's For Dinner, Pot Roast (Recipe)

I grew up on a farm with lots of livestock, including cattle.

 

Every year my dad would buy one or two sweet baby calves and they'd spend a few years getting fat on grass, hay, apples and hazelnuts. After a while the cows started having calves and we ended up with a good-sized herd on our small, three acre farm.


Candy Cow and Aries
 

They all had names: Skippy, Charger, Zeus, Apollo, Aries, Reddy, Echo, Bonnie, and Candy Cow are the names I remember. (I didn't name Candy Cow, my niece did. I was not impressed.)

Zeus, the Bad-Ass Bull
I named him Jupiter after the Roman God, but my dad couldn't get it right and kept calling him Jumper which I thought was so indignant for such a magnificent bull. Finally I said, "Just call him Zeus, dad! Same god only Greek." My dad did much better with Zeus.

 

Then every other year the butcher would arrive with his shot gun and murder them out in the backyard. It was gruesome. Gallons of blood and piles of body parts. Sad, but at the same time fascinating. Regardless of the naming ritual, we learned quickly not to get too attached. They were food. You want a hamburger? Get used to it. At least we knew exactly from where our food came. I think if more people took tours through factory farms, there would be more vegetarians. Our cows were healthy, happy and not mistreated. Well, usually not mistreated.

 

Skippy was my first calf. When he was tiny he'd follow me around the field skipping and jumping around me, hence his name. He got so big his back came up to my shoulder and his playful skipping got really dangerous. Not so cute anymore, but still sweet and friendly, unlike Charger who earned his name even as a calf.

Skippy and Charger

One day Skippy escaped through the fence when no one was home. My dad found him in the garden gorging on the veggies. He tried chasing Skippy out of the garden, but Skippy decided he didn't want to leave. He found snack paradise. And being twice the size of my dad, he had no fear so he skipped playfully (galloped clumsily) in circles around my dad rototilling all the plants up with his hooves pausing every so often to take a nibble of a plant. Frustrated and furious at the destruction of our whole garden, my dad grabbed his gun and shot Skippy in the butt. Skippy high-tailed it outta there although he didn't have much of a tail left. The vet visited later that day, scowled at my dad, and assured us Skippy would live another year or at least until the next butchering season. We always knew when we were eating "Skippy Burgers"...we'd find buckshot in every bite.

 

We grew up on steaks, hamburgers, meatloaf, beef stew, French dip, beef burritos and pot roast and took for granted the nightly gourmet meals of organic, grass-fed, steroid-free beef. As an adult, I'd order anything but steak in restaurants even when it was the menu specialty. I would have been happy to never see another steak in my lifetime. Other than hamburger I've rarely eaten beef let alone prepared it. According to the book Eat Right for Your Blood Type by Peter D'Adamo my body should love beef. For the Paleo diet, I've been eating hamburger, but I'm getting really sick of hamburger no matter how many ways I've tried to camouflage it. I need some variety to keep me from going crazy with food boredom so I decided to branch out to other cuts of beef. Today I'm experimenting with pot roast. I've never made pot roast in my adult life! I remember it being really good. Hopefully my memories aren't wrong.




Organic ingredients needed:

1 pot roast (preferably grass-fed, steroid-free, antibiotic-free)
1 tablespoon ground pepper
2 teaspoons sea salt
pinch of cayenne
1/4 cup olive oil
1 clove garlic, diced
1 teaspoon of fresh ginger, diced
1 onion, chopped
4 carrots, chopped
2 celery stalks, chopped (optional)
bay leaf
1 sprig rosemary or thyme  or oregano or one of each (you choose)
Kabocha squash, or other squash (optional)

Rub pepper, salt and cayenne into the pot roast.

Heat olive oil in large pan, sear pot roast on medium-high heat on all sides, remove. Put pot roast in baking pan or Dutch oven with fresh herbs and water about 1/2 way up the side of the roast. Add the onions, carrots, celery, and garlic to pot with the olive oil, sear quickly, remove, and add all of it to baking dish with pot roast. Cover with tight lid. Bake at 290 degrees until meat is very tender. Total baking time: about 3 1/2 hours for 3 lb. pot roast and 4 - 4 1/2 hours for 4 lb. pot roast.

 

 



I was going to add some squash as a replacement for potatoes, but forgot so I baked it separately. Next time I'll add the squash with the carrots and onions to the baking dish and see how that goes.

UPDATE: It was wonderful. Very tender, yummy meat.

I look forward to breakfast leftovers!

Yum!

Echo (one day old)
We ate him...eventually.