Slow-Roasted

      Tam received a Christmas gift of meat from one of her employers -- bison meat!  There was a good-sized chuck roast that she thought would be nice for the holidays.

     I agreed, but...bison?   It can be tough and dry.  So I pulled out all the stops: I'd slow-cook it over hardwood charcoal with a version of my roast pork vegetables.

     Once the grill was set up for indirect heat (two rows of coals and a space in the middle), I started with the meat -- salt, pepper, rubbed the pan down with olive oil and added a little Italian-style salad dressing.  It roasted for an hour while I peeled and diced an apple and a turnip.  The apple got a generous sprinkling of ginger and just a little ground cloves.  The turnip got garlic powder.  I added it to the pan around and little on the roast, in layers -- apple and then turnip.

     I peeled and diced a couple of parsnips, a red onion and a fennel bulb, and added them (with plenty of parsley) about forty-five minutes (or a bit more) after the apple and turnip.  That all cooked for at least forty-five minutes more, and then I added shitake mushrooms and it got another thirty-plus minutes.

     Here's the end result:

TAMARA KEEL PHOTO

     That's without adding any extra liquid.  It's just from the apple, vegetables and mushrooms.

TAMARA KEEL PHOTO

     The meat turned out nice -- tender, moist and flavorful.

TAMARA KEEL PHOTO

     We'll be having bison again!

     We'll be having parsnips, too -- for Christmas day, our neighbor had given us two enormous Porterhouse steaks.  I grilled them and put a split, peeled parsnip and a little butter wrapped in aluminum foil to roast on the grill while I made baked potatoes (microwave until mostly done, wrap in foil and put on the grill: they cook in the same time as a medium-well steak and are marvelous) and microwave-steamed fresh asparagus (our grocer sells it ready-to-go, with peppers and garlic butter).  The steaks were fabulous, a cut and size I would never buy for myself these days (our neighbor knows how I like to grill, being downwind of weekend cooking), the other vegetables were as good as ever, but the parsnips were an outstanding side dish, like carrots for adults, as wine is to grape juice.