Week 2’s menu calls for me to make a beef roast for dinner and I was fully expecting to have to skip this one and put it on the list to come back to at a later date. I have been watching the price of beef roasts for a couple of weeks and they had been super expensive. I was not willing to spend that much of my weekly grocery budget on a single piece of meat. However, I was very lucky in that my grocery store put beef roasts on sale the very day I had planned to make this menu. So someone must have been looking out for me on this project.
I was so happy to find the roast on sale. And it was a fantastic sale so for that I am very happy. The book just had me add some salt and pepper to the roast and that’s fine. I normally do just that a lot of times. I did find the estimate of the time required to cook the roast to be way off. I ended up eating much later than I had planned to get the roast to an edible rare cook. It was a good roast though and I do love a roast of any kind. I don’t normally splurge on a beef roast for myself though so this was a nice treat. It did not however give me enough drippings to do anything with so that was a bit of a disappointment.
The browned potatoes are something my mom used to do alongside a roast fairly frequently and I always loved them. I don’t remember actually doing them myself so again a real treat. They would have been a hundred times better however if the roast had given me some drippings for them to get coated with. Instead I did a couple of brushings with olive oil.
The
tomato salad was really simple, just peeled sliced tomatoes marinated
for a few hours in the same French Dressing that was on last week’s
menu. The same would work with any oil and vinegar type dressing and
it is really a side that should be eaten more often.
The menu called for hot brown-and -serve rolls but my small grocery store didn’t have any so I just did the same as last week and baked of a couple of the frozen bread rolls I have on hand.
For dessert the menu called for brownies and ice cream with a raspberry-current sauce. The sauce was super simple you cook some defrosted frozen raspberries with a bit of current jelly then thicken it with a cornstarch slurry. Only problem was I didn’t have any current jelly and neither did my grocery store. I decided to go with the apricot jam I had on hand and it turned out amazing. I am going to have to make this often in the future.
The cookbook did have a recipe for the brownies but also mentioned using a brownie mix to save time. Since I had half a box of brownie mix on hand I decided to use that today.
So what are my thoughts about the menu this week. I really enjoyed it. Just like last week it does remind me of the meals I grew up with. We almost always had potatoes as a side and my mom almost always put some form of bread on the table every meal. Those are not things I do as often.
The seasoning overall on the recipes are much more basic and simple compared to the way I normally season my food and it a way it is really nice. It just seems comforting in a way.
Again I want to thank you all for coming along on this journey with me. I am having so much fun and it is overwhelming how many people have reached out in support of me in this.
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