Roast Beef

Yesterday, owing to the Parental Units (who are both quite elderly) going out for a wild night of partying with other elderly folk until the wee hours of the evening (9:05 PM, gasp!), I opted to bake a pot roast of beef in their oven. It was awesome. I have a lot of practice with this sort of thing so I'll keep it short. 

3 lbs sirloin roast.
Marinade in Worchestershire (wooster!) sauce overnight.
Chop roughly the following: red potatoes (2), onions (2), stalk of celery, carrot (1). Add a dash of olive oil to the bottom of a big cast iron pan or dutch oven. Place beef on top so sauce drippings go onto veggies and flavor them. Place into 350'F oven and bake for around 50 minutes/lbs, or in this case about 2.5 hours or until meat thermometer shows beef is done. Not rare, not medium rare. Done. Why? Because in a chunk of meat like this, medium rare will be rare and largely inedible and capable of generating food poisoning if eaten later.

Why so few veggies? Because they only really taste good hot the first time. Reheating pot roast veggies tends to just leave you with yucky mush and you push that around the plate till you toss it. Kinda like cold french fries. Nothing you do will make those good again. I don't even recommend these for soup, since the Wooster sauce isn't often a good one for soups other than pumpkin/squash cream soup.

The difference between the above mostly-dry roast and a full on pot roast is whether you add a couple cups of water or beef stock to the pot or not. Water or stock will cause the meat to wet-cook and will cook faster, possibly going tough unless cooked extra long to make up for it. Omit the liquid and the dry roast will take a bit longer due to lack of steam but the beef flavor will be more intense and the veggies risk burning a bit. They won't be soft, at least.

Serve the above with a loaf of brown and serve sourdough (10 minutes in the same oven works fine for a crisp crust and hot interior. Serve with butter). Also serve with either a Zinfandel or a better Cabernet Sauvignon. Cheap cab is not very good. Cheap zin is often better flavor with beef so if you're on a budget, go with the Zin. If you have even more money, a good Pinot Noir would work well, or you could go with merlot, which tends to be a bit bland, imho. Don't bother with any of these if you're outside California right now. All the wine on sale was carried in uninsulated trucks so its gotten too hot and the esters were destroyed, ruined, cooked, burnt is the proper industry term. Those wines are worthless for anything but coq au vin or lapine au vin. Don't drink them. In spring, the trucks will be shipping cool wines that aren't ruined so you can safely buy again. I'm sorry if you don't like that. I was in a position to know.

I also recommend dark beers for this kind of food. I'm fond of stout, ale, and porter, which is a combination of the two. Lager is good for hot dogs or burgers or ribs, but roast beef is more flavorful so stronger beers are okay, and enhance the flavor of the beef.

If my relatives weren't visiting in a couple hours I'd be buying ingredients to make Clam Chowder, as rains are coming and the high today is 55'F, at most. Its good soup weather. And weather for sweaters and thick socks. Doesn't that make you want chowder?