Dark Days week 7: Pot roast

This week was the easiest local eating I’ve done so far.

My husband, Jerry, did nearly all the work. Jerry and I are huge fans of pot roast, and we make it pretty regularly during the winter.

For this roast, we used meat from our freezer stash, all ethically raised in Snohomish County. In the morning, Jerry seared it in a pan, plopped it in the crockpot and covered it with some cheap wine (from California, unfortunately, but hey, it’s what we had in the house.)

When I came home for the day, the house smelled divine. Crockpot cooking is excellent for building up a good appetite. It’s hard not to get hungry when you can smell good food for hours.

The meat had been going for about four hours, so I prepped the veggies and tossed them in. Every time we have pot roast, it’s different.

This time we had potatoes, parsnips, onion and leeks, which were all grown organically in Washington. I also tossed in a few carrots, because we had them, but those were from California. I could have left them out, the parsnips filled in fine for the carrots.

Jerry added a really lovely hard apple cider from Olympia to round out the meal. As I think on it now, it seems we should have had bread or something to add to the meal. Yet, as we were eating, none of the four of us enjoying the meal felt that anything was missing. I guess pot roast really is a one pot meal. We all pushed away our plates at the end, totally full and happy, so we clearly did something right.