Man’s quest to kill beasts and consume their high quality protein is an ancient desire. I assume at one point men hunted meat; chased these four-legged beast and killed them with their bare hands or primitive tools. Oh the drama inherent to the life of primitive man! But alas, life in the 21st century is much different. I go to the gym to simulate running after a large mammal, use machines to simulate throwing a spear at the beast, and do bicep curls to intimidate the beast with my awesome guns.
After I finish my routine at the gym, I shower off so I don’t offend people with my man stink and go to the grocery store. It is there that I kill… er… purchase large chunks of meat, pre-butchered and pre-packaged. Three and a half pound top round beef pot roast, I have conquered/purchased you! You will be in my belly soon! But cooking you takes way too long, and I basically want to eat your raw flesh now. What should I do?
Pressure cooker, you have the solution for me again! You can cook my cooking time down by a factor of like 4 and have me eating my big ass chunk of meat within about an hour.
So without further ado, read on for a kick ass pressure cooker recipe for Beef Pot Roast. I am sure that this would work well for non-pressure cookers, just add about 3 hours or more to the cooking time.
First, brown your meat in the pot, add:
1.5 tbsp Bacon Fat (or cooking oil or some sort)
3.5 lbs Top Round Beef Pot Roast
Salt and ground pepper liberally applied to the perimeter of the meat
Let the meat brown on all sides – this will take a little while, maybe a few minutes per side. Move the meat around to get a nice seal of cookedness on all sides. When the meat has browned, remove the meat from the pot and put it on a plate to the side for just a minute. You should have a little bit of brown meat residue in the pot that you are going to want to deglaze. To do that, add:
10 oz. water
Let that boil for a hot minute and you should start to see all that brown stuff start to disintegrate and dissolve in the water. When it has started to loosen and the pot is starting to look like it has lots of brown broth in it, add:
Your big chunk of brown meat that you removed from the heat just a minute ago
5 red potatoes, cut into bite size pieces
3 carrots, cut into bite sized pieces
1 yellow onion, roughly chopped (this is going to disintegrate anyway, so who cares how you chop it?)
4 cloves of garlic, minced
10 oz. of red wine
2 tbsp Salt
Ground Pepper
1 whole Chipotle pepper (this makes the dish kind of spicy, if you want it a little milder use half or less of the Chipotle)
2 tsp dried tarragon
1 tsp dried basil
And that is it! Look down at the pot and everything should look like a delicious mess. The liquid in the pot should basically be covering the meat, but it doesn’t need to cover it all the way. The meat will shrink in the cooking process and release all sorts of good juices that you are going to love. If the liquid doesn’t quite come up to about the 2/3rd level on the meat, add a little more water or wine to bring it up to snuff.
Close the lid and cook at pressure for 45 minutes. Turn off the heat and let the pot cool down naturally. When you open it you should have an awesome pot roast that is basically sitting in an awesome beef stew. Give it all a taste and add some more salt and pepper if you feel as though it needs it.
Remove the meat from the stew and place it on a cutting board (this will be juicy, be careful!). The meat should be tender enough to basically rip apart, so a couple forks or something like that should be good for getting it all apart.
Serve with a few hunks of meat with some rice and potatoes and carrots from the stew. Drizzle some of those stew juices all over the whole thing and maybe add a little green onion or something for color and you are good to go.
This protein packed meal is good enough for any hunter-warrior that this world has to offer. Simple meat cooked until it is super tender. The Potatoes should be awesome and have a buttery taste because they have absorbed a lot of fat and flavor from the meat. While you may not have killed the beast yourself, you did cook it, and in this day and age that counts for something… right?
Soup. In a snow storm I think that it is perfectly natural for one to desire a good home made soup. So I sought out to make an awesome soup today, and decided to whip up the best soup that I know of – lentil soup. I make a killer lentil soup in a pressure cooker, a recipe that I learned from my Dad and the Joy of Cooking. But there was a problem: no lentils. Oh I could just go to the store and get some… oh crap, there is 20 feet of snow on the ground – everything is closed!
I was downtrodden. Disappointed! Dispirit! Oh wait! I have yellow split peas! Those kind of look like lentils… why the hell not? But I don’t know any split pea soup recipes, and I don’t feel like learning anything new. Lets just replace the lentils in the recipe with split peas and maybe cook it all a bit longer. Genius!
I made this soup and it turned out awesome. In the pressure cooker the soup came out with a great consistency and the chipotle pepper powder gave it a nice little smokey after taste that I loved.
If you want to give it a shot, try my Snowmagedeon Split Pea Soup.
3 tablespoons of bacon fat (or olive oil)
1.5 Medium onions, diced
5 cloves of garlic, minced
1 bay leaf
Heat the pot and melt the bacon fat. Add the onion and garlic with a dash of salt and let it all cook for a minute or until translucent (but not caramelized). Add the whole bay leaf in there at some point in this process. Add:
3 medium carrots, peeled and diced
3 stalks of celery, diced
1 teaspoon of dried thyme
1 sprig of fresh thyme
a dash of oregano and a dash of basil
Cook until everything is tenderish, but not too long. Add a little more salt. Things should be smelling pretty good and you will start thinking that you can pull this shit off. Add:
2/3rds of a 28 oz. can of Diced Tomatoes
1 Lb (2 cups) of Dried Yellow Split Peas (rinsed and sorted)
8 Cups of Chicken Stock
Throw these three ingredients in there and stir around a bit to get everything acquainted. If you have a pressure cooker, put the lid on and bring the soup to a boil and let it cook for 15 minutes at pressure. If you don’t have a pressure cooker, simmer covered on low heat for probably like an hour or two.
Turn off the heat and let the pressure cooker settle down on its own. When it is ready, open it up and give it a stir and turn the heat of the burner back on to low, then add:
1 of those cooked sausages that you can find at the grocery store (diced)
1/2 teaspoon of chipotle powder
1 teaspoon of fresh ground pepper
1 teaspoon of balsamic vinagar
Let this all cook together covered for another 20-30 minutes and then you should pretty much be awesome. That will give the sausage time to soften up and loosen up some of that fat that is in there, and it will also give it time to blend in that chipotle flavor quite nicely.
Serve in a warm bowl (or a regular, non-warmed bowl) with a dollop of sour cream, a dash of hot sauce, and a sprig of fresh thyme.
DC got a couple feet of snow ever the weekend, causing the entire city to start thinking of clever ways to combine the word “snow” with other – more dramatic – words. Snowmagedeon. Snowpocalyse. snOMG. Snowvechkin. Snowshit. You get the picture.
Anyway, there was a lot of snow, and I decided to document at least a little bit of this to ensure that my little bit of cliche is added to the mix. Check em out!
I was at the bar the other night and saw two lines of text on a muted tv that said:
Good Night Feed
That was it. White bold text on a black screen. It was late I guess and the programming had run out, but I thought with computers and access to all sorts of shows with just a click of a button that we as a society had gotten past the blank screen.
As I sat there watching this screen sitting patiently, unflinching, behind my friends playing pool I began to wonder about what else might be going on during the transmission (or the lack thereof). Was there drone noise that frequently accompanies these types of screens? Was there music being played, something with an organ
, to keep people at least modestly entertained in the audible realm. Maybe there was radio programming going on, describing the current situation in Haiti or the (then) upcoming State of the Union speech. The world may never know for sure, but I like to think that there was something special going on behind the muted screen that eschewed the apparent lack of production and effort. That if we had just reached our drunk limbs over to turn on the sound, we would have been blasted with a cacophony of sound that would stimulate our ears to the point that we wouldn’t mind the abject status of the screen.
After Christmas I purchased myself a camera. I nice Nikon D90, so I can take pictures and be amazed at how poorly they come out in spite of the kick ass equipment. Upon seeing the less than stellar images, I will tell everyone back in high school I used to be quite good at this! And continue on about how not indicative this new work is of my actual visual genius.
Anyway, here are some images from my neighborhood that I took today to test the old camera out in real light. In high school, I used to be quite good at this. These images are not indicative of my actual visual genius.
I spent 4 months of my life as a bike courier in Toronto. It was a summer job to me, nothing more, just to keep the cash flowing as I prolonged my life in Canada for one last season. The characters that you meet as a courier are simply amazing. People with post secondary degrees, former waiters, ex-cons, rednecks, runaways and junkies. It is like a club for the socially maladjusted. I fit in well.
One of my friends on the job was a man named Jay. I never once saw Jay’s eyes – his sunglasses were always on, even in the dispatch office at 7:30 in the morning. He had a scruffy bead that went all the way down his neck that framed his unique smile perfectly. He didn’t have his front teeth, so he wore the worst dentures that I have ever seen. His dentures would sort of hang in the gap in his mouth, more or less creating a coherent set of teeth, but in that not really kind of way. His frame was slight, his tone was twitchy, but he was a relatively upbeat man that seemed to enjoy riding around on his Fuji fixed gear bike.
I would ask Jay questions about his life when there was down time. Over a cigarette he would tell me about running away from home at 13, being addicted to heroin not long after and the breaks that he needed to become a bike courier.