By August started Monday and the heat has not let up since. The high in Broken Arrow yesterday was a hundred and four degrees. The kitchen has not been below ninety, even at midnight, in two weeks. I have stopped using the oven from noon until nine in the evening, and what I want to write about today is the appliance that has saved my cooking this week, which is the crockpot, and the recipe I made in it, which is Mississippi pot roast.
I want to start with the math, because I always do, and because the math on this recipe is the single most expensive math I have written down all year, and I want to be honest about why I spent the money. The chuck roast was $7.84, marked down on the Walmart rack from $11.99 because it was a day from sell-by. A packet of ranch dressing seasoning was eighty-nine cents at Dollar General. A packet of au jus seasoning was eighty-nine cents at the same place. A stick of butter, fifty cents’ worth of the four-pack on sale at Aldi. A small jar of pepperoncini peppers was $1.69 from Aldi, and I used five peppers and have the rest of the jar in the fridge for sandwiches. Total: $11.40 for the dinner. The most expensive meal I have cooked this whole year, by a wide margin.
I want to say up front that I would not normally spend $11.40 on a single dinner. I have a column at the back of my notebook that tracks the cost of every meal I make, and most of my dinners cost between $3 and $5 and feed three people. $11.40 is more than three weeks’ worth of normal-dinner budget. But this week was different. This week we were eighteen nights into Cody being home for dinner, my Sonic paychecks have been steady, the savings envelope has $61 in it, and Mama’s electric bill came in lower than expected. There was, for the first time in I cannot tell you how long, a few extra dollars in the household pot. And I decided this was the week to spend them on a real Sunday roast, because we had earned a real Sunday roast.
The technique is what makes this recipe work in August. You do not turn the oven on. You do not turn the stove on. You take the chuck roast out of the package, you put it in the crockpot, you sprinkle the ranch packet over the top, you sprinkle the au jus packet over the top, you cut the stick of butter into three pieces and lay them on top of the meat, you drop in five whole pepperoncini peppers, and you put the lid on. You set the crockpot to low and you walk away. Eight hours later, the meat is fork-tender and the bottom of the crockpot has filled up with a salty buttery au-jus-and-pepper sauce that tastes like somebody’s mama spent three hours over a pot. The kitchen has not gotten any hotter than it would have anyway. The oven has stayed cold all day.
I started it at nine in the morning Sunday before my shift. I left it on low. I went to work. I worked the morning shift, eleven to two-thirty. I biked home at two-forty-five and the smell of the pot roast hit me from the back porch before I had the back door unlocked, that beef-and-butter-and-pepper smell that fills a whole house and makes a person who has been on her feet for four hours suddenly very aware of how hungry she is.
I made mashed potatoes on the stovetop while the roast finished its last hour. Mashed potatoes are the Sunday-roast side dish I trust the most: five russet potatoes from the bag I bought for $2.99 at Walmart, peeled and cubed, boiled for fifteen minutes until fork-tender, drained, mashed in the pot with three tablespoons of butter, a quarter-cup of milk, salt, pepper, and a small dollop of sour cream stirred in at the end. The sour cream is the trick I have been working on. The sour cream is what makes mashed potatoes taste like restaurant mashed potatoes instead of cafeteria mashed potatoes.
I plated three plates at six-thirty. The roast came apart with two forks. I spooned the buttery au jus over the meat and the potatoes both. Mama and Cody came to the table. The three of us ate.
I want to say something about the eighteen nights. I have been counting Cody’s nights at the table on a calendar in my closet, in pencil, with a small check next to each day. I started the count the day he came home from the eight-day disappearance, the day he slept twenty hours straight. The count is at eighteen now. Eighteen nights at the table. Eighteen plates I have not had to leave on the floor outside his bedroom door wrapped in foil.
What I have noticed about the eighteen nights is that he is doing better and worse in different ways at the same time. Better: he is sleeping at the house. He is washing his clothes on Sundays. He is eating real food. He has gained a few pounds back. His face has the color it used to have. He is shaving most days. He has started talking to me again, in short sentences, mostly at the table. Worse: he still leaves on Friday and Saturday nights for somewhere I do not ask about. He does not have a job. He has not enrolled in school for the fall, and school starts in two weeks. He has the flat-affect look in the morning sometimes, the tired-around-the-eyes look that I have learned to recognize even when his eyes themselves are clear. He is here. He is also still in trouble. I do not know how to hold both of those facts at the same time, and I am writing them down because I need to keep them honest.
The pot roast was for the better-Cody, the at-the-table-Cody, the version of him who said, this is real good, Kay, and meant it. Mama said, this is the best pot roast I have ever had in my life, baby. Cody ate three slices. Mama ate two. I ate one. The rest of the crockpot fed us for two more dinners and a leftovers lunch I took to my Monday shift in a Tupperware container with a tight lid. Three dinners and a lunch for $11.40 works out to about $0.95 per serving across twelve servings, which is back inside my normal cost-per-serving range, which means the meal that felt expensive on Sunday turned out, on the math, to be about average for the week. Which is the kind of math that keeps me cooking the way I cook.
School starts in two weeks. The Walmart back-to-school list is in my notebook. The wallet has $112 in it. The savings envelope has $61. The Cody calendar has eighteen checks. The pot roast is in the fridge. I do not yet know what to do with all of the gratitude. I am writing it down in pencil and hoping the writing does the trick of letting me carry it without dropping it.
The Mississippi pot roast recipe is below, the way A Family Feast wrote it. Four ingredients on top of the meat. Eight hours on low. The crockpot does the cooking while you go about your day. Make this on a hot Sunday when the oven is not an option. Make this on any other Sunday too. The recipe holds up either way.
Crockpot Mississippi Pot Roast
Prep Time: 5 minutes | Cook Time: 8 hours (low) | Total Time: 8 hours 5 minutes | Servings: 8
Ingredients
- 3 to 4 lb chuck roast
- 1 packet (1 oz) ranch seasoning mix
- 1 packet (1 oz) au jus gravy mix
- 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, cut into pats
- 8 to 10 pepperoncini peppers from a jar (plus a splash of the jar liquid if you like it tangy)
Instructions
- Place the roast. Set the chuck roast in the bottom of your slow cooker. No need to sear it — just drop it in.
- Add the seasoning. Sprinkle the ranch seasoning packet and the au jus mix evenly over the top of the roast. Do not stir.
- Add butter and peppers. Lay the butter pats on top of the seasoning. Scatter the pepperoncini peppers around and over the roast. Add a splash of the pepper brine if using.
- Cook low and slow. Cover and cook on LOW for 8 hours. Do not open the lid. When you come home, the roast should shred easily with two forks.
- Shred and serve. Use two forks to pull the meat apart directly in the slow cooker, mixing it into the buttery juices at the bottom. Serve over mashed potatoes, egg noodles, rice, or on hoagie rolls.
Nutrition (per serving)
Calories: 390 | Protein: 34g | Fat: 27g | Carbs: 3g | Fiber: 0g | Sodium: 820mg