I was going to make a pot roast. Chuck roast, carrots, celery, potatoes, onions, beef broth. Put it in the slow cooker before work and come home to dinner. A perfectly reasonable plan, except for the beef broth, which I did not have.
I did have French onion soup in the freezer.
I freeze soup because I like having things available for precisely this sort of occasion, although usually the occasion is wanting soup. This time, I needed beef broth and onions. The soup had both, along with garlic and thyme. Most of the seasoning was already done.
So I used it.
The roast was about 2¼ pounds. I seasoned it with salt and coarse pepper, seared it in cast iron, then transferred it to the slow cooker. A little red wine went into the skillet to loosen the browned bits, and that went in with the roast. There is no reason to do all that browning and then leave the flavor in the pan.
I added about two cups of French onion soup, four stalks of celery, four carrots, and two pounds of Yukon Gold potatoes. No additional onions. The soup had that covered.
Then I turned it on low and went to work.
About nine hours later, I came home and shut it off. It was probably ready after eight, but I wasn’t home after eight. That was part of the appeal of the slow cooker in the first place.
The flavor was amazing. Enough that I’ll make it this way again whenever I have French onion soup available. I started out trying to work around a missing ingredient and ended up with a recipe I want to keep.
The vegetables, however, required some reconsideration.
They were good. There were just more of them than we needed in proportion to the meat. Everything fit in the slow cooker, so I hadn’t thought much about it until we got to the leftovers: a container full of vegetables with a little piece of beef.
Apparently, I had made a vegetable dinner with a chuck roast contribution.
Next time, I’ll cut the vegetables by about a quarter. Three carrots, three stalks of celery, a pound and a half of potatoes. That should leave us with leftovers that bear a little more resemblance to the original dinner.
That adjustment is for my house. Yours might eat every potato and leave half the roast. You might want extra vegetables for lunch, or you might be feeding someone who considers celery a breach of trust.
The recipe gives you somewhere to start. What comes back from the table tells you what to change.
Cook for your house.
The Recipe
Ingredients
- About 2¼ pounds chuck roast
- Kosher salt and coarsely ground black pepper, to taste
- About 2 cups French onion soup
- A little red wine, for deglazing
- 3 stalks celery, cut into large pieces
- 3 carrots, cut into large pieces
- 1½ pounds Yukon Gold potatoes, cut into large chunks
Method
- Season the roast with salt and pepper. Sear it in a hot cast-iron skillet until well browned on both sides and around the edges. Transfer it to the slow cooker.
- Add a little red wine to the skillet and scrape up the browned bits. Pour the liquid into the slow cooker.
- Add the celery, carrots, potatoes, and French onion soup. Cover and cook on low until the beef is fork-tender. Mine cooked for about nine hours while I was at work; start checking around eight if you’re home.
- Taste the cooking liquid and adjust the seasoning before serving. The soup brings its own seasoning, so let that guide you.
The first batch used four celery stalks, four carrots, and two pounds of potatoes. The quantities here reflect what I’d use next time.