Chuck Williams' Pot Roast

Ah, cold fall weather and the season's first pot roast.  Roche Brothers had beef round on sale, and I found my favorite pot roast recipe, Chuck Williams' Pot Roast.  It was published in Celebrating the Pleasures of Cooking, a Time-Life book of yore.  I can't find the recipe on the web and as a special favor to my blog readers and to kick off the blog for winter events and cooking, I'm going to make a JPEG, so please heed.  If it's on the web I can't find.

Recipe:

To accompany the roast, I serve a simple salad and a skidload of roast veggies.  Set the oven to 400 degrees and prepare for baking:

large carrots, cut in half if large
celery stalks
parsnips, cut in halves
quartered or halved onions, depending on size
small unpeeled potatoes
cherry tomatoes
3-4 garlic cloves
Brussels sprouts (optional)

Toss the veggies with some olive oil and add a generous sprinkling of salt and pepper.  Set the oven to 400 degrees.
Hold back the cherry tomatoes and small garlic cloves until the last 10 minutes.  Put the rest of the vegetables in a roasting pan to hold and bake about 25 minutes or until almost done.  Add garlic and tomatoes for last  5-7 minutes.

If you have potatoes left over, they are delicious with eggs the next morning. 

Since there are two of us and we are getting 3 meals from the roast, I vary the menu by adding Brussels sprouts one meal and leaving the potatoes out and serving the roast with noodles.  You could also serve the carrots, potatoes and parsnips mashed (boil, don't bake).  If you are feeding a crowd, the roast will disappear.  Make sure you cook it until it's tender.  The balsamic vinegar is the magic. 

So good we nearly fainted

Chocolate Ice Cream To Die For

Last week, I wrote a post about the ice cream maker crapping out at a bad moment and the emergency trip to Williams-Sonoma for a new one.
After a proper time to chill the bowl (much less than the previous bowl, by the way), I poured the custard into the frozen bowl and pressed the "on" switch.  This ice cream maker is about 100 times easier to use the the old one. You pop in the bowl, pop in the top (no weird fitting and twisting and turning and having pieces pop back off again). Pour in the mixture (a nice wide opening, too!) . Let 'er rip.
It's easy to see how the ice cream is doing, i.e., is it ice cream yet?
It was, and quicker than the previous one, too.  Things just got better and better.  I did have to find a container to put it in.  You can't store it in the bowl, and as a veteran saver of "containers," I had an old plastic  half gallon container with a lid from days of yore  that fit the bill.
Froze for 30 hours.  It was so dark and rich looking that well, it screamed for the delicate Orrefors  Illusion crystal dishes. Hand washable, and so fragile that if you look at them cross-eyed, they break.
OMG!  Never tasted anything like this.  Dark and rich and creamy and died-and-gone-to-heaven ice cream.  Worth the custard and the caramel and the hassle of five steps in a half-hour and sweating not to screw up. 
The whole table almost swooned. It was that good.
Tonight, there are two piddly helpings left, and I must remember to photograph.  Gauche to whip out the camera in the middle of a dinner party.  I will definitely be making this again.  Remember, it's in the June issue of Bon Appetit. 
Chocolate Ice Cream
Yowza!

We all scream for Ice Cream

Bon Appetit's Recipe  for Chocolate Ice Cream.  OMG!

Adventures in ice cream. 

The June Bon Appetit mag arrives about the same time I decide to have a small dinner party.  Menu finalized, and I have chosen a somewhat complicated but decadent chocolate ice cream for dessert.  Buy dark organic chocolate!  Whole milk?  I mean, who has whole milk?  The process involves about 5 fairly complicated steps executed right after each other.  Pretty much destroys the kitchen.  The chocolate custard is supposed to cool for 2 days.  So. . . . today we get home from a long arduous shopping trip, the shop and eat lunch and drink wine till you drop kind of trip, and it's time to make the ice cream which needs to "age" for two days.

A few years ago we bought an ice cream maker which was always VERY hard to assemble.  The brand shall be nameless (it has been discontinued for some time) and every time I made ice cream, not very often, it was hell on wheels to get the stupid machine put together.  Click this piece into that piece into the knee bone connected to the shoulder bone.

The ice cream was always first rate.

Today the paddle did not want to snap in, no way no how.  It had issues.  Significant Other gave it a goodly whack and the paddle snapped in except it also broke a little bit.  We got out the super glue and fixed that sucker, but when it was time to complete the assembly, well, the paddle had somehow snapped out again and did not want to go in.

So I've got seven dollars worth of chocolate custard on the counter.  To the web!  With two days to go,  I can't buy it online.   I call Williams Sonoma at Legacy Place and they have a Cuisinart there.  We race over through rush hour traffic. Time is of the essence, because I know from experience that the bowl has to chill for, like, days.

Mission accomplished.  The ice cream maker is even on sale for Father's Day.  We do some shopping at Whole Foods and get into a huge traffic mess going home.  Plus every gas station advertising cheap gas means "for cash."  We pull in and out of half the stations on Route 1.  Stop at Stop 'n Shop for the on-sale cherries and a few more items.  The sun has set.  Race home and I pop the bowl into the freezer and put the getting long in  the tooth chocolate custard in the far corner of the fridge.  The bowl should be cold in 24 hours.  The party is in forty-eight. 

I'll let  you know how the ice cream turns out.  The chocolate custard tastes remarkable.  Deep and rich and not too sweet.

My favorite flavor is rum raisin, although once I ate some Grand Marnier ice cream that almost made me change my mind.  We whipped up some Port Wine ice cream in house that was also pretty remarkable. 

Well, time to chill, in more ways than one.  Never a dull moment here chez Grapeshot.  And thank you, friendly helpful folks at Williams Sonoma.   By the way, the best pot roast recipe ever was devised by Chuck Williams.  Just thought you might want to know.

Onward.

I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Ice Cream

About a year ago, S.O. and I were shopping with a friend at the Williams Sonoma outlet at the Wrentham mall and discovered an ice cream maker that was really really reduced in price. I had always seen these really cool (!) recipes in Gourmet and Bon Appetit that require an ice cream maker and glossed over them. The time to purchase such a device seemed ripe.

Our friend told us that we were too fat already and why make ice cream and get even fatter, her somewhat flawed reasoning being that one would only eat ice cream one had made. Ha ha! Like the supermarket doesn't have it, or Boston doesn't have a bunch of super-yummy premium ice cream parlors.

We bought it anyway, but due to both guilt and all of a sudden no ice cream recipes in Gourmet and Bon Appetit (had they, too, bought her philsophy?) we never opened the box.

This week I volunteered to bring a dessert to a dinner party and thumbed thru some old recipes for something incredibly delicious, using fresh fruit in season. I found a plum pie with a streusel topping and lemon-lime ice milk. Hey! Ice milk--practically low-cal, right?

So we unpacked the ice cream maker and took it apart and washed it, as directed, read the instructions 16 times because this suddenly didn't look so simple. Anyway, I put the bowl in the freezer for 24 hours as indicated, and yesterday morning I made up the lemon-lime ice milk mixture, which was really simple, because I didn't have to make a custard. With that properly chilled, and the pie crust cooling in the fridge, it was time to make the ice cream, and we had to assemble the freezer again. I confess to being an idiot about following verbal and pictorial instructions, all of which are written by folks who can assemble the whatever in their sleep. After a number of false tries, we finally got the thing together before it thawed and the ice milk was made and popped into the freezer--no problems there. Then we had to disassemble the rest of the pieces to clean. We couldn't get the paddle out. More reading of the instructions and much cogitating and tentative pulling and twisting. The paddle was stuck tight. Finally, I told S.O. to give it a very strong yank, and voila! out it came.

We decided to try the ice cream making again, real soon now, hoping to become more adept at the process.

I am pleased to report that the pie was scrumptious and the lemon-lime ice milk was sweet and tart and frosty and not too rich, almost low-cal. Almost. What's better, there are two pieces of pie left for dinner tonight, and a bit of the frosty stuff. All's well that end's well. I'm thinking of rum raisin or coffee next. And definitely some frozen yogurt, to balm the conscience.

Isn't that what one does with a conscience? Bad and guilty are bannable words. Shun them. To the back of the dictionary with you, I say.

Onward,

Grapeshot