Amy Thielen's Pot Roast

I love the idea of a regular weekly menu routine. It seems so neat and tidy, knowing that Monday will always be meatless, Thursday will be the weekly feast of leftovers, and Friday night will forever feature homemade pizza.

However, in my real life, it never, ever works out that way. Schedules are ever-changing, the contents of my fridge and garden are never the same from one week to the next, and some evenings all I want is popcorn. How's that for tidy.

On Sunday, though, I make an effort to have a decent meal on the table, "a meat and three" as they would say in the South: a centerpiece protein and three sides. This past Sunday, with eight of my nearest and dearest around the table, we bumped that up to meat and five or six, including the grand centerpiece: Amy Thielen's pot roast.

Amy is a Minnesota-based cook (I think she'd prefer "cook" over "chef" - I know I would), with a Food Network TV show that I honestly have never seen as I don't have cable, but I've been following her everywhere else and was pleased as punch to get her cookbook The Midwestern Table after strongly hinting about it over the holidays. (Thanks Santa!) She's giving Midwestern cuisine the recognition it deserves and tweaking recipes to bring out the good stuff (hello fresh herbs and fresh lake fish) without getting too hoity-toity about it (a whole chapter devoted to potatoes and onions? yesssss). And others have taken note, with her recent win of the prestigious James Beard Award. Plus, she seems genuinely sweet and responds to kind tweets. How Minnesota nice.

Setting grandly in my red Dutch oven, the meat slowly roasted for hours at a gentle 285-300 degrees F, filling my kitchen with that rich, meaty scent that only happens on Sundays. Guests arrived, kids ran around the house with Nerf guns while my sister-in-law and I gabbed over relish trays and place settings. The pot roast was presented with exclamations of "This is the best pot roast I've ever eaten" and other such gushy statements. The cook will often pass off such compliments as nothing, but secretly, he/she adores it. Promise.

Classic Beef Pot Roast 
Adapted from Amy Thielen, her original recipe includes pistachio salt on top, the gilding of the proverbial lily. I skipped it, but check out the original recipe here if you want to try it out. 

1 (4-pound) beef chuck roast, the more marbled the better
Fine sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 tablespoon canola oil
2 tablespoons salted butter
3 stalks celery, cut into thirds
3 large carrots, quartered
2 medium turnips, quartered
3/4 cup dry red wine
2 cups beef stock, low-sodium store-bought or homemade
2 large Vidalia onions, cut into eighths
10 cloves garlic, whole
4 dried bay leaves
1 tablespoon minced fresh rosemary
1 tablespoon minced fresh thyme
1 cup cherry tomatoes

Season the roast liberally with salt and pepper. Heat a Dutch oven over high heat, add the oil, and then add the roast. Sear it quickly until dark brown on all sides, about 8 minutes. Set the roast aside, pour off and discard the excess fat from the skillet, and let the skillet cool a bit. Then add the butter, celery, carrots, turnips, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and 3/4 teaspoon pepper. Cook over medium heat, tossing, until the vegetables begin to soften at the edges, about 5 minutes. Transfer them to a wide bowl and reserve.

Preheat the oven to 300°F. Add the wine to the Dutch oven, bring to a boil, and cook until slightly reduced, about 3 minutes. Add the beef stock, and bring to a simmer. Arrange the onions in the bottom and set the beef on top of them. Scatter the whole garlic cloves, bay leaves, rosemary, and thyme over and around the roast. Cover and braise for 1 hour. Reduce the oven temperature to 285°F, and continue to braise for 2 hours.

Uncover, skim off the fat around the edges with a small ladle, and discard it. With two large forks, carefully turn the meat over and ladle some juice over the top. Add the reserved sautéed vegetables, arranging them around the perimeter of the meat. Cover and braise for 1 more hour.

Skim the fat again with a small ladle, baste the top of the meat again, and then scatter the cherry tomatoes across the top, some dropping onto the meat, some onto the vegetables. Don’t stir again. Braise, uncovered this time to allow the tomatoes to split and shrink and the top of the meat to brown, until the meat feels extremely tender at the touch of a fork, 30 minutes to 1 hour. Discard the bay leaves. Serve the pot roast right from the pan, pulling apart the meat with two forks for most of it, and gently carving the marbled top end of the chuck into thick slices.