Friday Night Pot Roast Dinner

I found a chuck roast on sale at Food Lion the other day for less than 1/2 price, which meant it needed to be cooked immediately if not sooner, as in 2 days ago.

I quartered and halved two onions and put a whole head of garlic in my crock pot.

I put in the meat on top and salted and peppered both sides.

I added in a can of beef broth - low sodium.

And a small can of tomato sauce.

About one cup of red wine. Then a glass or 5 for the cook.

After about 4 hours on low, I added carrots, celery, potatoes, and sweet potatoes. And gosh golly does this ever smell wonderful. The wine really gives it a boost.

After 4 more hours, the meat is falling off the bone, except there weren't any bones, so I'll just say it's really, really tender.

My plate with the meat, celery, carrot, onion, potato and the one leftover cornbread muffin from Thursday dinner. The sauce is particularly good - very rich and the addition of the wine takes it to another level. You could cut the incredibly tender meat with a fork and it was bursting with flavor. The potatoes had soaked up the flavors of the sauce and really didn't need any butter, but of course I added some because what's a potato without butter, I ask you. The celery was a nice light taste that was a nice addition to the rest of the meal. Cornbread is always a winner. And cooked carrots, mashed with some butter is just sublime.

You can squeeze the garlic right out of the skin and baked/cooked garlic is a wonderfully sweet puree.

The nice thing about these crock pot meals is that you can get rid of lots of leftovers in the fridge. After everything had cooked, I found a container of butter beans from the other night so I added that in. And after a meal or two of this, we'll doctor it up and make a soup by adding more tomato sauce, possibly more beef stock, more veggies (peas, squash, zucchini come to mind), and Mr. Hawthorne likes to add pasta to it. Toast some buttered slices of a nice baguette (or brickette, as Mr. Hawthorne refers to it) and you won't know you're eating leftovers. You'll have a whole new delicious meal.