This is Cooking By Accident. So I decided to cook a roast in the crock pot.
During my trip to the store this week I picked up a pot roast, some onion soup mix, a can of cream of mushroom soup and some egg noodles. It sounded like a good combination in my head. I sliced up the roast into smaller chunks and threw them in the crock pot. Added one of the two packets of onion soup mix and filled the crock pot with water til it covered the meat. Cranked it up to high and let it cook for about 5 hours or so.
When the meat was tender, I tossed in a bag of egg noodles and added some water to cover the noodles. When the noodles were tender, I drained out the water and added the can of cream of mushroom soup. Then I remembered I had some leftover sour cream in the fridge from last weeks tacos, so I tossed that in there too. Mixed everything up and suddenly (and completely by accident) I had made beef stroganoff! Or at least something very similar to it.
It… Was… AWESOME!
This was my second ever attempt at using a crock pot. I’ve seen other people use it before, but never really had a need to use one in the past. My first attempt, last week, was yet another accidental meal.
I happened to see what I thought was a brisket. The package had the words “Beef Brisket” on it. I figured the crock pot was a quick and easy way to cook it before putting it on the grill. Besides, it’s been over 100F here for about a month now and I really had no desire to turn on the oven.
Following the directions on the package, I put the meat into the crock pot along with the juices and the contents of the seasoning package that came with it. I added a few other seasonings I had on hand that sounded good (garlic powder and some mesquite flavoring). Let it cook for about 6 hours, til the meat was tender. I figured I’d finish it up on the grill, but never made it that far. As it turns out, I had made a “Corned Beef Brisket.” It came out perfect, and without the essence of cabbage I’d grown up with (yuck). I served it with some white rice.
This was the reason I bought the roast. It turned out so well I figured why not try an actual roast. But that ended up becoming stroganoff. Two attempts at using a crock pot, having no idea what the hell I was cooking til it was done. Cooking great meals completely by accident!
I guess cooking isn’t as much as skill as it is being able to translate between what you have in mind and what your tongue tells you to do.