Holiday Foodie Posts - One of More Than One - The Roast

We managed to do enough cooking and entertaining to feel like it was the holidays but not so much that we massively over ate.  Pretty nice balance.  Our first meal was a couple of days before Christmas.  We had Wild Bill and Jill over and we split up the cooking responsibilities.  I'm still working my way through Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Italian Cooking (a multi-year project as I've noted in the past).  I found a very interesting pot roast recipe that I wanted to try as it had minimal ingredients but some different techniques and I'm a sucker for technique oriented cooking.

Ingredients consisted of a pork shoulder roast, carrots, bay leaf, nutmeg, salt, pepper, and wine (lots of wine).

The first thing you do is tie your pork shoulder up, cut your carrots into sticks, cut small wholes in the roast and then stick the carrot sticks in the wholes...very unusual.

These are carrots from Wife's garden by the way.  They keep in the ground through the winter so you just go out with a shovel and dig some up.

Salt & pepper the roast and coat with flour

Brown it all over

Then add the other ingredients along with enough wine to come up to the top of the roast.  The recipe said two cups.  This is two cups.  Turns out I needed a bottle and a half.

Then you cook the thing under low heat for a long time, turning frequently, until the meat starts falling apart and the wine is reduced (with the meat from the juice) to almost syrupy consistency.  At sea level this is supposed to take 3 hours.  Here at 6000 feet, it took 7!  Good thing I accounted for this and started cooking early in the day.

The end result was very, very, very good.