Pot roast, attempt #1

Last Friday hubby and I went to Whole Foods for their wine tasting.  I love it both for the tastes of wine and the samples of food.  This time they had a pot roast at the meat department station.  It was SO good!!!  I picked up the recipe because I knew I had to make it at home!!!

Yesterday was the day ..... I got online and went to Whole Foods website.  I found this recipe - http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/recipes/2324

I went to the store and bought all the ingredients.  I bought 2 3/4 pounds of meat, half grass fed beef, half buffalo.  I bought the already cubed kind because that's how I like my pot roast.  I don't like making a whole roast, though maybe I should try it that way sometime.

I bought 7 large carrots, a bag of potatoes, two cans of tomato paste, and two boxes of beef broth, all organic.

I mixed 6 tbsp flour (more than double because there's more surface area with the cubed meat), 3 tsp. dried thyme, and some salt and pepper, heavy on the salt.  I also added garlic powder.  I didn't see the garlic cloves the recipe called for, but I thought that it needed garlic and that this was a good place to add it.

I rinsed off the meat cubes.  My husband used to work at a grocery and a few times worked at the butcher shop in the grocery .... he says ALWAYS, ALWAYS rinse the meat, so I do.  Then I put the meat cubes into the flour mixture and stirred it around.

I heated up some oil in the pot I was going to cook the stew in, added the meat, and browned as directed in the recipe.  I scraped the bottom of the pot.  Because both grass-fed beef and bison are low in fat, there was nothing to pour off.

I cut up all the veggies as directed (Wow!  I followed directions with that part!!) and added them, the broth, and the tomato paste to the pot and stirred.

If I had a crock-pot, I would have put all the ingredients there, but since I'm using my Aga, I left them in the large, cast-iron pot.  I put it in the 350 degree oven because I made it at lunch time and not in the morning.  I would have used a lower temperature if it had been the morning.

I checked on it about 3:00 because I needed something to eat before I went to teach pilates.  I could eat it, but the veggies were still crisp and the meat still firm, not what you want for pot roast, but it tasted great!!

My husband was supposed to feed it to the kids about 6:15 when two of them got home from band.  He saw me making this at lunch, but I guess I never told him to EAT IT!!!  So ...... it sat in the 350 degree oven until 7 PM when my daughter got home from teaching her pilates classes (yes, we both teach pilates!!).

When I found out at 7:45 that hubby didn't feed it to the kids and called home to see if they ate it (you can't smell food cooking in the Aga because it vents outside, so they wouldn't have known it was there), my daughter said yes, and that she put it back into the oven she got it out of instead of just the warming oven, so it continued to cook.  Argh!  But she did comment that it was GREAT!!!  They LOVED it!!

I got home about 8 PM, and by then it had cooked a bit too long.  It tasted wonderful, but lets just say, I was glad I was not having dinner guests because by this time it was not pretty.  The meat had fallen apart so much my husband thought it was a vegetarian dish.  Five hours earlier, the meat was not cooked enough, so next time maybe 3 hours less cooking time, two hours more than what it was at 3, haha.

Oh, and on top of all this, when I was gone, I found the REAL recipe for the pot roast I liked at wine tasting in my purse.  NOT the same recipe at all!!!!  Next week, be looking forward to the pot roast I liked at Whole Foods!  Tonight's dinner, leftovers.  :)  Leftovers are great because in combination with not teaching pilates today, I have the whole day to get my painting project done!!!

I served the pot roast with Whole Foods pretzel bread and butter.  Yum!