Slow Cooker Shredded Beef — The Sunday-Set-and-Go for the Tight Week

Mama’s tip envelope at the diner was thinner than usual two weeks running, and I noticed before she said anything because I’m the one who counts it on Sunday nights for the bank deposit slip she fills out Monday on her break. The summer tourists who’d been pushing through Sapulpa on the way to Branson had thinned out by mid-August, and the regulars who came in every morning and tipped a steady fifteen percent were taking their own vacations now — Mr. Greer was at his daughter’s in Texarkana for the rest of August, the Bowman couple was at a cabin in the Ozarks for ten days, and the morning table mix shifted to the kind of customers who order coffee-only and leave a quarter under the cup like that’s a tip. Two weeks of that adds up. Mama didn’t complain — she almost never does — but I watched her count the envelope Sunday night sitting at the kitchen table with her shoes off and her hair still pinned up from the lunch shift, and I saw the math on her face. The number landed somewhere south of where it usually does. I went to bed thinking about it.

So Monday morning before she got up I drove to the IGA and walked the meat counter looking for a yellow tag, which is what they put on the cuts that are within a day of their sell-by date and need to move. I found a chuck roast just over two and a half pounds with a yellow tag knocking it down from twenty-something to twelve and change — less than five dollars a pound — and I bought it along with a bag of yellow onions, a head of garlic, a packet of taco seasoning that was on sale for sixty-nine cents, and a sleeve of corn tortillas. Sunday morning I rubbed the chuck with salt, pepper, paprika, and dried oregano from the pantry; seared it on all four sides in the heavy pan over high heat for about three minutes a side; and then put it in the slow cooker on top of two quartered onions and a whole head of garlic with the top sliced off. A cup of beef broth from the carton I’d already opened, half a cup of cheap red cooking wine I had a third of a bottle of leftover from a brisket two weeks ago, a tablespoon of tomato paste squeezed from the freezer log I keep, and the whole thing went on low for eight hours.

The house smelled like a steakhouse by hour three. By hour six, you could smell it from the front porch. Mama came home Sunday night after the four-to-eight shift and didn’t even take her uniform off — she walked straight from the front door to the kitchen, lifted the slow cooker lid, and said “oh thank god” out loud to what she thought was an empty room before she realized I was at the kitchen table doing summer reading. The beef shredded apart with two forks the way good chuck does when it’s been on low long enough — you don’t cut it, you just pull. The collagen had dissolved into the gravy and turned the whole pot glossy.

I’d already done the math. Sunday night dinner was beef on toasted slider buns with the pan drippings spooned over and a pile of slaw I’d shredded earlier. Monday I packed lunch tacos for both of us — corn tortillas, beef, a quick onion salsa, lime wedges. Tuesday was beef sandwiches on the rest of the bun bag with melted provolone and the pan drippings as a dipping cup. Wednesday I made beef-and-rice with the last of the gravy stretched with another half-cup of broth and a frozen bag of mixed vegetables I’d bought for ninety-nine cents. Thursday I shredded the last cup with cheese into quesadillas on flour tortillas. Five meals out of one twelve-dollar yellow-tag roast, and I broke it into Tupperware containers so Mama could pull whichever one she wanted before her shifts. She didn’t comment on the math but she stopped looking tired around the eyes by Wednesday.

Wednesday night was also writing program, and Marcus told us he’d been talking with the library board about printing a small anthology — ten pieces, one from each of us, paperback bound, a hundred copies, sold at the library front desk for five dollars apiece to fund next summer’s program. He said the deadline for our final pieces was August twenty-fourth, eight weeks out. He wanted my Cody piece in particular. He wanted Iris’s grandmother piece. He went around the room and said specifically what he wanted from each of us, by name, and the way he said mine made my hands shake under the table for a full minute. I walked out of the library at nine-fifteen and stood in the gravel parking lot for ten minutes under the streetlight just listening to the cicadas before I could put the key in the truck and drive home.

The sear before the slow cook is what makes it — don’t skip it. Here’s the full method.

Slow Cooker Shredded Beef

Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 8 hours | Total Time: 8 hours 10 minutes | Servings: 6

Ingredients

• 3 to 3 1/2 lbs boneless chuck roast
• 1 packet (1 oz) ranch seasoning mix
• 1 packet (1 oz) au jus gravy mix
• 4 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into slices
• 6 to 8 pepperoncini peppers
• 1/2 cup beef broth
• 1 lb baby potatoes, halved
• 3 medium carrots, cut into 2-inch pieces
• 1 medium yellow onion, quartered
• Salt and black pepper, to taste

Instructions

1. Season the roast. Pat the chuck roast dry with paper towels and season lightly with salt and black pepper on all sides.
2. Layer the vegetables. Place the potatoes, carrots, and onion in the bottom of a 6-quart slow cooker in an even layer.
3. Add the beef. Set the seasoned chuck roast on top of the vegetables.
4. Add seasonings and butter. Sprinkle the ranch seasoning mix and au jus gravy mix evenly over the top of the roast. Lay the butter slices over the roast and scatter the pepperoncini peppers around it.
5. Add liquid. Pour the beef broth around the sides of the roast, not over the top, to preserve the seasoning coating.
6. Cook low and slow. Cover and cook on LOW for 8 hours, until the beef is fall-apart tender and the vegetables are soft.
7. Shred and serve. Use two forks to shred the beef directly in the slow cooker, stirring it through the juices. Taste and adjust salt if needed. Serve over or alongside the vegetables with the pan juices spooned on top.

Nutrition (per serving)

Calories: 480 | Protein: 42g | Fat: 24g | Carbs: 18g | Fiber: 3g | Sodium: 820mg