Slow cooking the shit out of 2011

It was a culinary kind of Christmas.

Santa brought not one but TWO slow cookers. Something, or someone, was trying to tell me something:

I want meat, and I want it tender.

And so we began 2011 with a three pound cut of beef chuck roast, Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook and a programmable Cuisinart slow cooker.

If you are to enter into the slow cooker way of life there are a few things you should take into consideration:

1) Do not begin your maiden meal at noon on a Sunday
2) Best to do your grocery shopping the day before so that everything is ready to go
3) For God's sake, take the contraption out from it's comfortable Styrofoam nestle of a box

Since we like to live dangerously, we opened our precious piece of meat half past 1 in the afternoon for what was quickly becoming a late night pot roast snack.

But it was hard to stop. I mean look at that thing. It begged to be slow-cooked.



We chopped a few veggies, braised the beast in the new All-Clad pan, simmered a little dry - or available - wine from our Box 'O and plopped the whole thing in the slow cooker -- setting it to a generous eight hour timer.





And away we went.

We were giddy with the idea of all that flavor and tenderness working away without us. We had hired out, or out-right stole, Cinderellas little bird and mice friends for an afternoon of free cooking labor while we hit the town. It seemed scandalous.

Four hours later we were starving and had exhausted our neighborhood activities.

We returned to our meat-smelling abode with stomachs growling and patience waning.

We watched a movie, flipped through old issues of US Weekly and, being desperate for the passage of time, tidied.

It was brutal.

We ate a salad appertif in ten minutes that was meant to kill two hours.

I began boiling water for the egg noodles with 90 minutes to go. Within 30 minutes we were slicing up that tender puppy, weak in the knees, not caring a lick to wait any longer.

I threw some flour in the cooker and jimmied together some gravy. I piled egg noodles, the falling-apart meat and the soupy gravy high in a bowl and we just stood and stared at our non-work.



Sure it was 10 p.m. but... It. Was. Glorious.

Somehow in all the commotion of those first cooking moments I neglected to pour salt and pepper on the mound of meat (Me! Forgetting salt!) so it did lack a little depth of flavor, but the tenderness made us quickly forget any such negligence.

It was indulgent and delicious and, I can say from experience, even better the next day.

Of course three pounds of chuck roast is WAY more than a couple needs, but it did get us three meals worth and its more meat than we would have normally eaten in six months.

Oh, glorious, slow cooker, I can tell we are going to have a very happy and caloric life together.