Cold Weather Cooking

All of a sudden, the weather turned sharply colder this weekend - especially the nights. For us, this meant pulling the tiny, old air conditioner out of the dining room window. And it meant that it was time for Sam and I to shift into our fall/winter/spring mode of cooking.

Removing the air conditioner was no big deal - other than a wrenched back. Figuring out what we were going to cook took a little more time.

For our first hot, un-grilled meal in quite a while, we decided we would ease into our colder weather cooking projects by cooking something in the crock pot. This involved two things. It involved me going down the basement to try to find where I put the crock pot. And it involved Sam and I figuring out what were were going to do with it, when and if I found it.

Finding the crock pot isn't as easy as it sounds. It had been about eight or nine months since I last used it, and this meant that wherever it was in the basement, it had about eight or nine months worth of opportunities for crap to get stacked on top of it.

I went down the basement and after a few tentative pokes into precarious piles of soon-to-be treasures (none of which contained a crock pot), I managed to narrow down my search to the most likely area where it might be buried (FYI: Zone #38.7b). Sure enough, there it was - hiding under a couple of moving blankets, an old jacket and a box of toys that the kids haven't played with in the last twenty years (which we're keeping anyway - just in case).

So I dragged the crock pot out of the basement and did my best make it presentable, if not usable, by scrubbing it several times in near scalding water.

Next, Sam and I had to decide what to cook.

Sure, we probably could have cooked something from our freezer, but this would have involved chipping away at the tundra in hopes of finding something food-like and trying to figure out what the object actually was (or, more appropriately, what it had been). Even if that were possible, which is unlikely, we would have been wasting our time.

It's pretty much guaranteed that whatever we might find, would have freezer burn all over it - a result of having spent decades under the ice of my non-frost free freezer. So I decided that, like usual, it was better to leave that stuff undisturbed (except for when I cram in more, soon to be forgotten, soon to be unidentifiable, food in front of it).

Instead, as with most of our meals, we decided to let the grocery store sale flyer dictate what we would be cooking. Thankfully, the store had roast beef on sale. We both like roast beef but past experience has taught me that the beef from this particular store sometimes tasted less "beefy" than it should, having only a "beef-like" quality about it.

Since we were cooking this in the crock pot, I decided it really didn't matter. We would be shoving in so much other stuff, it was bound to come out tasting nearly edible, no matter what.

Now we had a game plan. We made a list of our preferred ingredients, checking to see what we already had (which, as it turned out, was only the essentials: onions and garlic). Everything else went on the grocery list.

After our return from the grocery store (where we bought everything on our list - as well as a bunch of other stuff ) - it became apparent that we would have to slightly alter our regular routine.

When it comes to crock pot cooking, Sam and I usually do all the prep work the night before, then we stick the crock pot in the refrigerator for the night, and I take it out the next the morning and let it cook for most of the day. But it had been a busy day so we didn't have the time do any of the prep in advance - which was just as well because, much like the freezer, there was no room in the refrigerator to fit in the crock pot.

So, Sam and I did the prep work early Sunday morning. Like usual, I cut up the onions and the "beef" (somewhere along the line, we decided to go from a roast to beef stew). Sam, with periodic guidance, did the rest.

Sunday evening was chilly again so it was good to have a nice, hot meal. That's something else I like about the fall - being able to cook together and being able to enjoy it together, when we're all done.

Before

After