Weekend Roast

     There was a good chance of dry weather on Saturday, so Friday night, I picked up the ingredients for beef pot roast along with a no-effort supper.

     Friday was awful.  Three -- or was it four? -- weeks ago, I was starting a long stint of vacation relief downtown when I discovered the air-conditioning in my car had conked out.  There was no good way to get it fixed while working a relatively inflexible schedule unless I handed my elderly Lexus mini-SUV -- and my pocketbook! -- over to the dealer, so I've been white-knuckling through it.  On Friday, I had to drive from our downtown location the the North Campus as the later-afternoon rush hour was beginning.  The heat and humidity made crawling along with the early departees especially wretched.

     After work, I wasn't going to cook.  Hauling myself through the grocery was effort enough.  Their deli had supper: a rotisserie chicken, vinegar-based coleslaw (my favorite kind!) and Greek farro-chickpea salad.*  The butcher shop had Choice-grade chuck roast for not too much and I went basic on the vegetables: celery, carrot, red onion, potato and fresh corn on the cob. I picked up some porcini mushrooms, too.

     Friday dinner was fine.  The grocery does justice to their cooked chicken and their best deli sides are creditable.

      Saturday was another hot day, but it doesn't take much time to cut up kindling and build a charcoal fire.  While I suspect any middle-school-aged kid from the parts of the world where charcoal stoves are the norm would snicker at how slow I am, I managed with a couple of sticks of kindling, a broken-up shake, a page of newspaper and one (1) match and had well-started coals in the time it took to sprinkle a little Worcestershire on the roast, add coarse salt and pepper, get out the roasting pan, lay a couple of forks in the bottom, go outside and rake the coals flat, make a gap in the middle, set the grill bars in place, load the roast into the pan and put it on the grill.  I added three bay leaves on the meat for luck.

     The chuck roast was 2.8 pounds.  I set a timer for three hours.

     I let it cook for a half hour while I washed and cut up the potato, put some rosemary on it and got three good-sized onion flowers from our gone-wild garlic chives,  I washed them and laid them on top of the roast among the bay leaves.  (Yes, onion flowers: edible, tasty, strongly oniony.  Raw ones make a pretty garnish.)  While I was outside, I picked a half-cup of tomatoes from the garden, two yellow pear tomatoes and the rest tiny cherry tomatoes.

     Carrots and a couple stalks of celery followed, cut into big-bite sections, and the onion was next.  There was room for one ear of corn cut into four short sections, so I added it with about an hour to go.  I added two more ears of corn to the grill, wrapped in two layers of foil with a pat of butter to keep them happy.

     Meanwhile, I had mushrooms and tomatoes. I'd been thinking about putt the tomatoes with the roast, but changed my mind.  A little butter in the grill saucepan, with alternating layers of sliced mushrooms and quartered tomatoes, with generous amounts of Italian-mix seasoning and a little more butter on top along with a couple of Piparra peppers, chopped.  I covered it and set it in a corner of the grill.

     When the timer went off, my thermometer confirmed the meat was done.  It was tender enough that it almost fell apart!  Veggies and broth were tasty, and the short cobs of corn were outstanding.  The chuck roast had lots of flavor.  The mushroom and tomatoes dish had cooked down to a a wonderful sauce loaded with mushrooms.

     And the last hour of cooking, it rained off and on.  So much for the forecast.  My aluminum foil rain hood protected the closed grill.
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* The basic combination is widespread around the Mediterranean: cooked farro (grains of wheat), cooked garbanzo beans, black olives, feta or similar cheese, raisins, greens and a mild dressing.  Count it as bread, cheese and vegetable, and it's a light meal in and of itself.  You'd think some punster would tilt the ingredients in a slightly Egyptian direction and serve up Pharoah farro salad, but no.