Cooking at Home - Pot Roast / Beef Stew

It is unusual for me to post an actual recipe…usually I just write in broad generalities about meals we create at home.  However, in this case we liked the meal well enough to actually walk through the ingredients and steps involved in making this pot roast. 

The other issue is that I took it off an Internet video that didn’t have a recipe attached.  Consequently, I had to view the video over and over again until I’d written down all the ingredients as well as the process itself.  Since then, I've been unable to find the original site to give credit to the chef...

The recipe called for 4 pounds of beef chuck roast and we didn’t want to stray from the recipe by trying to cut back on the beef and guessing at ‘revised’ quantities for the other ingredients.  Of course, this also created a lot of leftovers…and I love leftovers! 

Laurie rubbed the chuck roasts with Montreal Steak Seasoning.  Using an iron skillet heated and then lightly coated with olive oil, I browned the meat on both sides.  Then I removed the beef from the skillet and sat it to the side.

In the meantime, Laurie had chopped up a large onion and 3 cups of cut up carrots.  I added a half stick of butter to the skillet and scraped up the bits left from browning the meat just for a bit more flavor.  Then Laurie put the vegetables in the skillet and I stirred everything together, briefly sautéing the onions and carrots. 

The next step was the addition of a 16 oz. jar of pepperoncini and all of the juice to the mixture, blending it together.  Next we added a packet of McCormick Beef Stew Seasoning, a packet of McCormick Au Jus mix and a packet of ranch dressing mix…stirring it all together.

Then came a 15 oz. can of tomato sauce…then adding half of a can of water to the mix. 

Then we blended everything together and let it simmer for about 5 minutes.

In the meantime, those beef chuck roasts were place in our crock pot.  Laurie then poured the mixture of seasoned vegetables, pepperoncini, juice, and tomato sauce over the meat in the crock pot. 

The pot roast and vegetables then spent 8 hours in the covered crock pot with the temperature set on high.  As it slowly cooked, the marriage of the varied ingredients wafted throughout the house.  It smelled great!

This was not your standard pot roast, that’s for sure.  Laurie served hers next to her mashed potatoes and I had mine on top of the potatoes.  We really enjoyed this variation on a ‘standard’ pot roast.  It turned out to be more of a piquant beef stew than what one normally sees with a beef pot roast.  The meat just fell apart, the carrots held up and the onions basically dissolved into the sauce.  The pepperoncini themselves had a nice flavor but they were not ‘spicy hot’. 

The meal did pick up a little heat from the pepperoncini juice and if you’re heat adverse, I’m sure that the recipe could be modified accordingly.  It wasn’t too spicy for Laurie and it was mildly spicy and flavorful to me… Of course, eating it with mashed potatoes also reduces any ‘heat’.  I do know that this home cooking project provided us with a couple of great ‘leftover’ reheats and easy to clean up meals.

Enjoy!  Just click on any of the photos to enlarge them…

Thanks for stopping by for dinner!

Take Care, Big Daddy Dave and Laurie