Day 10 - The End of The First Full Week

Yesterday after lunch we both used up our second "cheat" of the week and we each had a diet soda. Aside from water, I don't think there's a naturally occurring item in diet soda and it felt remarkably sinful. And tasted wonderful--there really is nothing quite as sweet as forbidden fruit....er, uh, chemicals.

This far into our experiment, it has become obvious that we ate processed foods for their convenience. Soup? Open a can. Sandwich? Buy the bread and the sliced turkey injected with a strange jelly-like substance. Pasta? Buy the pasta and often the sauce. So, unless I want to spend an entire year in our kitchen--a perfectly lovely room and everything but not where I want to spend every day--I was going to need some allowable convenience foods, otherwise known as leftovers.

Since the cooking & entertaining marathon known as "Christmas," I had pretty steadfastly refused to do any grocery shopping, but this week I was finally driven to go to the store. I was really good--I did a Costco run for some produce and a variety of meats (my apologies to the vegetarians of the world), then our local grocery chain. We have a mid-size chest freezer in the garage, which currently looks like we're ready for a siege of some sort.

One of the Costco items was a package of 3 round eye (or eye of round, depending on your butcher) roasts which I had no idea what to do with, but they are on the small side & looked about right for two people and enough leftovers for convenience but not so much that we'd start dreaming of roast beef. Other generations of women called their mothers for cooking advice. My generation goes straight to Google, and I found pages and pages and pages of information. A recipe for high-temperature roasting looked promising, so I printed off the recipe and headed to the kitchen.

Problem number 1: The recipe called for a 3-pound roast and I had 3 roasts that combined weighed just a little over 5 1/4 pounds.

Problem #2: We have a kitchen scale that weighs up to BUT NOT OVER 1 pound.

All I could say for certain was that my roast weighed more than a pound but considerably less than 5 pounds. Since the roast was cooked for 7 minutes per pound, I took a wild guess and went for 12 minutes. Then the recipe said to turn the oven off and let the roast cook for 2.5 hours without opening the oven door. Fine by me--the less involvement required the better. I went to pick up Theo.

I got back home just a little before the time expired, and when we checked the roast and it was 110 degrees--not the 145 we were aiming for. Have you spotted problem #3 yet?

Problem #3: Had it hit the correct temperature already and was cooling down, or had it not reached it yet?????? The picture showed a very rare piece of meat, which didn't help at all. We opted for the less-likely-to-cause-food-poisoning route and turned the oven on and waited until it reached the right temperature.

What the recipe actually said: This recipe takes a very tough piece of meat and makes it so tender and delicious.....The easiest roast you'll ever cook.

What we got: Lukewarm dry roast beef with no flavor whatsoever. Complete with enough leftovers for several more meals. Lucky us. I can now understand why they opted to call them "convenience" foods. "Foods that won't kick your arse in the kitchen" was just a little too close to the truth.........