Perfect Pot Roast and Gravy

Like many people, I used to do pot roast in a slow cooker.  Unfortunately, it always yielded rather mediocre results.  Determined to find a better way, I stumbled upon this recipe.  They roast is wonderful, but their idea of "gravy" and mine don't jive, so I change it up at the end.  Follow this recipe exactly.  Don't add veggies to the roast.  Don't add salt to it.  Don't change a darn thing!  Trust me.

Preheat your oven to 350.  In a cast iron dutch oven, heat 1 tbsp of olive oil.  When it's nice and hot, sear your 3-4 pound chuck roast for 4 minutes on each side.  Don't touch it.  Don't poke at it, don't wiggle it around.  Just put it in for 4 minutes, flip it, and do another 4 minutes.

While it's searing, slice one medium onion and chop 2 cloves of garlic.  When the meat is done searing, remove it, and cook the onions and garlic in the juices for a few minutes.  Turn off the burner.  Add in about a tsp of salt, some fresh ground pepper, and a bay leaf.  Put the seared roast on top and place another bay leaf on top of the roast, cover it with the lid, and bake it in the oven for 30 minutes.  Turn the oven down to 300 and cook for another hour to hour and a half, depending on how done you want it.  When it's done, remove the roast and let it rest on a cutting board for 10-15 minutes.  DO NOT CUT INTO IT.  Unless you like dry meat.  If you don't let the juices redistribute before slicing in to, all the love juice will seep out and your roast will suck.  On to the gravy.

You'll be left with lovely onions and garlic swimming in some beautiful beef broth.  Put the dutch oven on a burner over medium heat.  Whisk in 1/4 cup of flour until it's all incorporated.  Add in a bit of milk.  How much just depends on how thick you like your gravy.  I like mine fairly thick, so I just use a few tablespoons.  Season with salt and pepper and keep whisking it over medium heat until it's the consistency you want.  You can add some Worcestershire if you like.  Sometimes I do.

Slice up the meat.  Mmmmm, meat.

Serve with buttermilk mashed potatoes and drown it in gravy.  Don't worry fret about the lack of veggies on the plate; I had a salad with this, I swear.

Chicken and dumplings

Nothing quite says down home cooking like chicken and dumplings, does it?  Of course, depending on who you ask and where you're at geographically, "chicken and dumplings" can mean a lot of things.  Round, pillowy dumplings?  Or flat noodle-like dumplings?  Are there veggies and cream?  Or just plain broth?  There are as many chicken and dumpling recipes as there are grandmas in the world, and whatever you grew up on is what you love best.  My own grandmother made chicken and noodles, which are my fondest memory of holidays at her house.  Sadly, she passed away before I was old enough to have the sense to get the recipe from her, and I've never been able to find a recipe that replicates what she made.  I do know that she'd make up her dough and roll it out into paper-thin sheets, which she would cut into perfect noodles that she would let air dry on newspaper overnight (waking once at night to flip the noodles over).  I remember the chicken and noodles were very yellow and slightly thick, just right for pouring over her mashed potatoes and gravy.   If I could wish for any food, that would be it!

As for me, chicken and dumplings in my house is broth, chicken, and thick, flat dumplings.  That's it!  I do sometimes make the round dumplings, but I save those for chicken stew.

I cook the chicken and make the broth at the same time (fancy, right?)

To a stock pot, add your whole chicken, and onion, a couple stalks of celery, a carrot or two (I'm really precise with my measurements, huh?), salt, pepper, and a bay leave.  Add enough water to cover it all.  Bring it to a boil, skim off the yucky chicken foam that forms on the top, and cover it and let it simmer.  The longer, the better, as far as I'm concerned!  I put mine on in the morning and let it simmer most of the day.

After it's cooked through, remove the chicken to a strainer to drain and cool off.  Remove the veggies and bay leaf from the broth and then run a small hand strainer through the broth if you want to remove any little bits.  I leave the broth simmering so no gross germy things grow while my chicken is cool off.  Once the chicken is cool enough to work with, remove the skin and pull of the meat.  You can either shred or chop the meat, it's up to you.  One thing I will say is SAVE THE BONES.  You can save them to make bone broth to can or freeze for other meals.  It's worth it.  If you're not going to do it within a few days, put the bones in a freezer bag and do it later.  Dump the chicken in and bring the broth back up to a gentle simmer.

On to the dumplings.  This also doubles as a noodle recipe, so if you're feeling up to it, feel free to do that.  You'll need-

2-4 eggs (I usually use 4, but I've also used 2 or 3 when I've gotten to this point only to realize I'm nearly out of eggs, and they come out just fine)
2+ tbsp of water (start with 2 tbsp, and add more water if needed)
3 cups of flour
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda (you can omit the banking soda and salt if you're using self-rising flour)

Mix up the flour, salt, and baking soda in a large bowl with a whisk (or sift it if you'd like, I'm just lazy).  Make a little well in the center of the flour.  In a separate bowl, whisk up the eggs and 2 tbsp water.  Add them to the flour and start mixing (again, I'm lazy, so I usually use my Kitchen Aid stand mixer).  This is a stiff dough, but you'll need to add enough water to make it workable and to keep it from gunking up your hands.  Once the consistency is right, you lay it out on a floured surface (if you stuck with a small kitchen, and thus, teeny tiny workspace like me, divide the dough in half and do it in two batches).  Roll it out until it's as thin as you can get it (I usually give up around 1/2 inch) and then use a pizza cutter to cut it into diamonds.  Like this-

Drop them into your gently simmering broth that's now full of chicken, then put a lid on it and walk away for 20 minutes.  Don't peek.  Steam helps get you nice soft dumplings instead of falling apart or yielding horrid little cement things.  You'll be rewarded with this-

Salt and pepper as you like and dig in.

How I Learned to Cook

When I got married at the ripe age of 18, I had not a clue how to cook.  If it wasn't pre-made, or didn't have 3 simple steps to follow on the back of a cardboard box ("Just add hamburger!") I was hopelessly lost.  It's not surprising; although both of my grandmother's were excellent cooks, my mother was a miserable failure when it came to the kitchen.  There were a few things she could make well, like meat loaf (of all things), but most of what we ate was pre-made, highly processed, or from a can.  I didn't realize until I was an adult that I actually did like things like peaches and asparagus, because I had only ever had them canned.  (If you've never had canned asparagus, just trust me- it's absolutely disgusting).

Lucky for me, my new sister-in-law bought me a copy of Betty Crocker's New Cookbook for Christmas the first or second year we were married.  I love this cook book and always recommend it to fledgling cooks, because it isn't just recipes.  It does teach you the basics of cooking; how to chop, dice, and julienne, how to avoid giving your family food poisoning through cross-contamination, basic cooking charts for all varieties of meats and and veggies, and so on. I used my old edition until it was literally falling apart, and after several dropped hints, received the 10th edition a couple of Christmases ago from my mother.  Thanks, mom!

Although my foray into cooking originally began out of sheer necessity- a young family starting out simply doesn't have the money to eat all processed and pre-prepared foods- it really did turn into a passion over time.  I enjoy cooking, and moreover, I enjoy feeding people!  My heart is in the down home, midwest cooking that my grandmothers prepared when I was a kid.  Buttermilk biscuits and sausage gravy, pot roasts, chicken and dumplings, bread pudding; while I might make the occasional coq au vin, nothing says dinner to me like meat and carbs! 

I also cook with real food in mind- I almost always use homemade chicken broths that are full of vitamins and minerals and gelatin, real butter, lard from local pastured hogs, farm eggs from chickens who nap in the sunshine and scratch in the dirt; these things matter! They're more nutritious, they taste better, and they connect you to the local community in ways processed junk like margarine never will.

I hope this gives you a taste of what this blog will be! Cheers!