I've got an awesome one but it's at home while I, alas, am at work. However it's a Greek potroast and you throw in tomato sauce, red wine and cinnamon sticks & do it all in a big pot on the stove. I add feta cheese as well. Try googling Greek pot roast? It's brilliant.

Can these go in the cooking blog too?
Because i made falafels cmonkey or somebody mentioned once and i want to make them again but i can't for the life of me find it.

Can you check for me when you get home? I'm also paging Elizard to this thread.

okay, here is my greek pot roast (no need for oven):

Get a nice chunk of mean (beef, tenderloin, rib-eye). Open holes and stick garlic gloves, celery pieces, your favorite aromatics (eg rosemary). Put in a pot and *boil* with enough water to cover it, in medium heat, for 1.5-2 hours. Make sure you keep adding water as needed. Boiling ensures that the meat gets soft and does not dry out.

Then make the sauce: get a large lemon (or as much as you like), squeeze the hell out of it, add a teaspoon of mustard (I use spicy), half a cup of wine and a tablespoon of plain flour and put all this in a shaker (or something you can shake). Shake vigorously for the mixture to mix.

Pour into the pot and onto the meat, bring to high boil for a few minutes until the sauce is as thick as you like it. Done. Usually I make mashed potatoes or rice to escort that.

sorry for the english, I have a horrible headache.

mean=meat.

Can these go in the cooking blog too?

I don't know. Can they? Help me out, cause I have a headache and I cannot think right now. Be very explicit. Or feel free to post mine there too.

Do you have a crock pot?

I usually make a fairly standard pot roast in a crock pot with red potatoes, carrots, onions, a roast, beef stock, a little cheap red wine, bay leaf, some fresh spices if I have them, pepper and a shitload of molasses, like a third of a bottle, that is my entire secret and it's good as hell.

I think MGL and Pode both have posting privileges to the cooking blog, and I thought Elizard was involved as well, although she's on dial-up these days and is in transit between homes, so may not be easily available.

well, I fergot to say that the meat must be about 1pound. And salt and pepper to preference closer to the end of the boiling ritual.

It makes me very happy to hear people liking red sauce with cinnamon in it. It is a very traditional way of cooking that's dwindling.

I need exact ingredient list and quantities, and step-by-step instructions like you were teaching an idiot.

And I do not possess a crock pot or slow cooker.

What are:

exact ingredient list and quantities, and step-by-step instructions?


I do not understand those words used in that combination.

For serious... things like stews and pot roasts can be improvised, which is the best way I know to teach yourself to cook in a casual way, recipes are good, but to have a feel for cooking you have to kind of go it alone, otherwise you end up trying to do something exactly to a standard that doesn't always apply*, that's just me though, cooking is way easier than people make it out to be, just add things slowly and don't burn the garlic. Take things that you like to eat and bang 'em in a crock pot and cook for 8 hours, keep the crock pot on something that doesn't melt. I think crock pots are a good investment. For my pot roast just find a basic pot roast recipe and add about 1/3 of a large bottle of molasses and a five second pour of red wine.


* This does not apply to baking, that's science not art.

we like slow cookers for pot roasts as well, primarily because they have a really nice tendency to not explode. :)

never tried molasses in a pot roast. sounds intriguing.

what divino said. Also, in cooking, exact recipes rarely work for me. Obviously, you try a couple of times and you get it right in the end (by right, I mean the way you like it). Besides, different stoves work differently and I cannot account remotely for that.

Anyway, my recipe was quite detailed but I thought I'd weigh in, lightly.

What I mean is like standard recipe format in American cookbooks.

E.g.

1 pound butter
1 cup sugar
1 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

1. Mix dry ingredients in bowl.
2. Cream butter and add to dry ingredients.
3. Mix until uniform.
4. Bake in 350 degree oven for 30 minutes or until brown.

P.S. I just made that up, don't anyone cook it, please. Sorry if I'm being US-centric. I'm just not a very experienced cook.

matildaben, I just tried your recipe, and it's fantastic. But I've got a pot roast question--when do I put the pot in?

this recipe is very similar to the one that i usually throw together into a crock pot before leaving for work, except i replace the water with red wine and use a packet of onion soup mix instead of beef bouillon.

slow cookers are very nice to have around. versatile, too.

Here is mine. I tweak it like crazy, but here it is copied directly out of the book. I'm too lazy to go to blogger & put it on the blog, sorry. . .

4-5 lbs beef pot roast, chuck or round
1/4 lb butter
salt & pepper
2 onions quartered
3 cloves garlic, crushed (I use more like 6. Or 8.)
2 stalks celery cut into chunks
1/8 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp cloves
1 tsp allspice
3 bay leaves
1 cinnamon stick, broken in half
28 oz. can whole tomatos
8 oz can tomato sauce
1.5 c. red wine
.5 c water
Salt & pepper the roast (actually, I use McCormick's Montreal Steak stuff for this, whenever I'm doing beef)and brown in 2 tbsp. of the butter in a heavy pot. (I use Great Aunt Claire's kickass 1930s heavy thick oval aluminum pot that I love yet which will probably mean that any moment now I will forget what I'm typing) Set meat aside & drain fat. (I usually skip this step too ;-))
In the remaining butter in the same pan saute onions, garlic, celery, & spices until all nice & soft, then put the meat back in, add everything else (the tomatoes & the wine & stuff & this is usually where I also toss in a big old scrumbled chunk of feta cheese) cover the whole thing and simmer for two hours. Results do vary - sometimes this is awesome & sometimes's it's just okay, but whatever, it's not like usual potroast. I serve it with egg noodles so I can ladle the sauce over it.

FUCKING EGG NOODLES!!!!

YES!

Electric frying pans with the big tall lids are just the thing. Thermostat adjustable, no less.

Here is mine, with ingredients as exact as you will need them to be:

INGREDIENTS

(1) Electric skillet w/lid.
(2) A piece of meat. I recommend a rump roast. They're all 3--6 pounds.
(3) A bag o' baby carrots, opened.
(4) A nonion, chopped up.
(5) Some celery. Any amount you buy will be more than you need.
(6) Two 1-quart tetrapaks of good quality beef broth

INSTRUCTIONS:

(1) Turn on the skillet and let it get real fuckin' hot.'
(2) Take the meat out of the container and dump it in the skillet. Brown all sides, well. Really, no shit. Brown them more than you think you need to. Remove to a plate.
(3) Dump carrots, a couple ribs o' celery, onion into the pan. Cook them a bit if it makes you feel better; you're about to cook the living shit out of them. Add some other spices if you like, whatever smells good to you. Sage, maybe. Or some cayenne if you likes your food a bit spicy. Whatever floats your boat. A bit o' salt 'n' pepa is always nice too.
(4) PUT. ZE CANDLE. BECK. Erm. That is, put the meat back.
(5) Pour in some beef broth so it's going partway up the meat.
(6) Turn the heat down to 180--200 or so, put the lid on, and walk away.
(7) Check on the meat every 20 minutes or so and top up the broth when it runs low. When you check on it, you want the broth a little more than simmering but not full-on boiling. Add more broth when what's there has turned into sort of a runny goo. If you get through both quarts, you will have truly badass gravy, which is good.
(8) When it seems done (2 hours or thereabout), take the meat out and put on a plate to rest. Pour the pan drippings through a strainer into a bowl, and then dump the bowl back into the skillet. Add some water, like a couple-three cups, and some spices, again whatever smells good to you, or nothing at all. In a coffee cup, mix a couple-few tablespoons of corn starch with a like amount of water and stir with a fork. When the juicy-water in the skillet is bubblin' pour in a smidge of the cornstarch-water mix and stir in, ideally w/ a nonstick-safe whisk. Repeat until the gravy is almost but not quite as thick as you want it -- it'll continue to thicken a bit.
(9) Eat the used-up carrots. They're better than candy.
(10) Cut the meat against the grain, so that the fibers are short.

EAT IT UP YUM.

Egg noodles are fine, but really dangerous people eat pot roast with mashed po-ta-toes.

Actually it might make more sense to add the water to the pan when the veggies are still in it. Then scroodgle the veggies around until they've given up their delicious coatings, and dump through a strainer* into a bowl, and back into the pan sans used-up veggies.

*myself, I have a ten-inch strainer. It was long my goal to be manly enough to make use of a ten-inch strainer. I call it The Crippler.

Yeah I vote mashed potatoes with pot roast, but I'm having beef stew tomorrow and with that I demand egg noodles and MGL said egg noodles and I kinda flipped out a little but in a good way, like when a dog is so happy to see you he jumps in the air and sorta ollies himself so he lands on his ass and then wiggles around like a nut to get back on his feet. Like that, but for egg noodles.

I'm gonna put potatoes in mine coz that's the way my family did it.

Thanks for humoring me, y'all.