Sunday roast

Hubby and I celebrated our 7th wedding anniversary last week, and only a few days after that, I did something I've never done in my married life: served a Sunday roast dinner. Now, we don't eat a lot of red meat around here, and when we do, Hubby's usually the one to cook it. But every now and then I like to try something new in the kitchen.

We wanted to invite some friends and family over to tell them, with food, how much we love and appreciate them. Coincidentally, there was a special at Food Basics on eye of round roast, which was 1.99$ per pound. I picked up a 7 and a half pounder and promptly researched how to cook it, figuring it would likely go into the crock pot for several hours. As it turns out, it works well to rinse, dry, and season the meat, put it in a roasting pan, and cook it at 500 degrees for 7 minutes per pound (53 minutes total for ours), then turn off the oven and leave it shut for 2 and a half hours. No peeking or anything. I actually put the oven lock on after Hubby went to check it out of habit. It cooked up beautifully, and I discovered that I quite prefer rare roast beef to well done.

One of the benefits of cooking such a large roast is the copious pan juices that you can turn into delicious gravy. I cheated and used gravy from a packet for once, but then stretched it with flour and water to double the yield. There was even a bit left over. Which leads to another benefit: despite having eight adults at our table, we only finished about two-thirds of the meat we cooked. So, my job tomorrow will be turning those leftovers into something, which will probably be some sort of beef and barley soup.

This is not a picture of roast beef, but we may bring the beef soup with us to the cottage this weekend. You can bet this kid will be spending a lot of time in this spot by the water!