Mudder's Best Pot Roast!

This pot roast pwns. Josh loves it, everyone I've made it for loves it, and best of all, it's more or less fool proof. All you need is:

Tools:
A casserole dish and lid (large enough to fit your roast) or large dutch oven.
A large skillet for browning/making gravy

Foods:
A roast (mine was about 1.5 kilos, but I've made smaller and larger roasts with similar results)
1/2 cup flour
3-4 tbs hot Hungarian Paprika
salt and pepper
3 tbs oil
A package of bacon
1 cup red wine
1 pint mushrooms, quartered
1 large onion, diced
4+ cloves of garlic (to taste, really), pressed
A few sprigs fresh thyme

Preheat oven to 325 degrees, and begin heating your skillet with oil to medium-high heat. Meanwhile, in a medium bowl mix together flour, paprika, salt and pepper. Pat dry your roast with paper towel, and dredge it in flour. Shake off excess flour and reserve for later. Brown your roast in the hot skillet. To brown, make sure your pan is hot, and place the roast on the pan and just leave it. Don't touch it until you're read to turn sides, otherwise you'll risk dislodging the delicious browned parts on the outside! Give each side a couple of minutes. You'll want the whole roast to look dark brown and crispy. This part should also smell amazing. While you're browning you can arrange the bacon in your pan, making two intersecting layers that your roast can rest on. Essentially, you want to wrap the whole roast in bacon. Usually I do two layers of bacon so that I can wrap around the entire roast. Toss your mushrooms, onions, and garlic around the roast and pout in the wine. Place thyme on top. It should look like this:

Place entire roast in the oven for 2-3 hours. I usually check the roast after about an hour. You should see significantly more fluid in the pan at this point, like so:

That fluid is dissolved connective tissue from the roast. The results will be tender, succulent, pull-apart-with-you-fork meat. We usually serve it with mashed potatoes, yorkshire pudding, and either salad or steamed vegetables. Now to make gravy is quite simple. You should give yourself about 10 minutes before slicing into any cooked meat (to prevent steam escaping and drying it out) which is ample time to whip up a gravy. It's really quite simple: If making your roast in a dutch oven, use a slotted spoon to remove mushrooms, bacon and any other solids from the fluid. Bring to a simmer, and ladle out about a 1/4 cup of fluid into a measuring cup. Add 1-2 tbs of reserved flour from browning, and whisk until smooth. Add this mix to the fluid and whisk. Allow to simmer on low, until desired thickness is achieved. Season as desired.

Enjoy with beautiful presentation and good friends! Served here with garlic and green onion mashed potatoes, and lemon broiled asparagus.  Also, a big thanks to our pal Joe Campbell for providing beautiful photos and company for this dish!

Cream of Green?

A lovely spinach, zucchini, mushroom cream soup!

I realize this picture looks like guacamole. I also realize that it's not easy to take good food pictures with a cell phone. But I digress...



This soup is amazing. I threw it together on a whim this afternoon and was so amazed I decided to start a food blog over it. It was a pretty quick recipe, including prep, it was about an hour and a half. This is comfort food at its finest; it's rich, creamy, flavourful, and also full of some pretty good things for you! I have a feeling this could be made into a lovely vegan variety by using avocado or perhaps soy creamer instead of cream, but I will have to experiment with that (or you can!). Also, the yield can be reduced, I just happened to have two pounds of zucchini and a pound of spinach to get rid of! This recipe might seem a bit elaborate, but it only dirties three dishes, and the flavours are just so good. It's also vegetarian if you use mushroom or veggie stock, plus, it looks so vibrant and beautiful!

What you need:

Kitchen wares:
a large stock pot
a medium sized baking sheet
a counter top or hand held blender

Foods:
3 tbs olive oil
One large white onion
5 cloves of garlic
3 sticks of celery
2 lbs zucchini
2 litres stock
salt and pepper

8 oz (one small package) mushrooms
2 tbs olive oil
salt and pepper

1 cup cream
1 lb fresh spinach
3 tbs fresh dill
probably more salt


What to do:

Turn oven to 400.

Swirl some olive oil into a large stock pot, and set it to medium heat. While it's warming up, dice up that onion and toss it in. Turn that heat down a little, and while remembering to stir occasionally, start in on cutting up your zucchini. Slice it as thin and consistent as you can and then add it to the onions. Crush (or dice) the garlic and add it to the zucchini and continue to cook until zucchini starts to soften and turn translucent. At this point, you can add your celery. Doesn't much matter if you dice it, because it's all going into a blender anyway. I just cut it into 3 inch lengths and tossed it in.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, quarter your mushrooms and toss them in olive oil, salt, and pepper. Place on a baking sheet and brown in the oven for about 15 minutes. You can do this while the zucchini is softening. Please note, the only reason I did this was because I forgot to brown my mushrooms with the onions before putting stock in. You can also just brown the mushrooms with the onions, however, baking them this way gives a very lovely nutty flavour that you will notice in the end product.

Add soup stock to pot and bring to a boil. Once mushrooms have browned, add to soup. Taste for salt, and check zucchini for consistency. When all the veggies are soft, add cream and stir.

Now here comes the fun part! A few cups at at time, remove soup and blend in a blender! Now, what I did here was with each blending, I added a handful of spinach. If you have a hand held blender, I'm sure you could just toss the spinach in and then blend as usual. If you are using a counter top blender, just be patient, and don't do too much at once. This can explode and burn you or your helpers (sorry Josh...) On my last run with the blender, I threw in some fresh dill.

Serve hot with a thick slice of multi-grain toast or a pita!

Pro tip: Stir a teaspoon of pesto into your bowl of soup of maximum flavour overload.