I’ve never been a fan of roasted meat.  It’s just not one of my favorite flavors.  For years, every time I’ve found a roast on sale at the grocery store, I’ve scoured the interwebs for a recipe to make it worth my while.  Jason always loves them.  The boys eat them without complaint.  But I’ve never been happy with any of them.

Enter a really, freaking good sale on boneless pork shoulder blade roasts in Safeway’s meat department last month.  We bought two.  And I was unthrilled.  Thrilled with the price, don’t get me wrong ($1.59/lb.! $6.80 for a full roast, aka two nearly-complete family dinners!), but most definitely unthrilled at the prospect of cooking and eating those big ol’ hunks of meat.

At a loss for what to do, and in no mood to comb through AllRecipes.com yet again, I read the instructions on the label of one of the roasts and decided to proceed as advised by my friendly grocery store meat department.  You may recall the result from my December 12 of 12.  It looked like this:

It was phenomenal.

I mean it.  Not only did I not mind eating it, I actually enjoyed it.  It was moist.  It was tender.  It was tasty.

So, here, for your perusal and perhaps your eventual taste budding joy, I share the Simple Roast Recipe:

  • Preheat oven to 325F.
  • Heat 2 Tbs. oil over medium-high heat in an oven-proof pan.  Pat roast dry with paper towels and season with salt and pepper.  Sauté roast on all sides until browned, 2 to 3 min. per side.
  • Insert oven proof thermometer so tip is in thickest part of roast (unless it comes with a plastic pop-up timer, like mine did!).  Cover and bake for one hour without adding any liquid.
  • After one hour, add desired vegetables and 1 – 2 cups chicken broth.
  • Continue cooking (covered), until temp reaches 175F.  (2.5 – 3.5 hours total cooking time)

Not really much of a recipe, is it?  More of a procedure.  There are two steps that offer room for creativity.  First, in the initial seasoning.  Salt it well, of course, but you can add some herbs here in addition to the salt and pepper.  Second, you can go nuts at the “add the veggies” stage.  We love new potatoes and carrots, and I can’t imagine making something like this without a few cloves of garlic and some big chunks of onion.  (If you look closely at the photograph above, you can see that I shoved some small garlic cloves into the roast itself – yum!)  This is also where I add my herbs.  I fell back on one of my favorite combos: rosemary and thyme.  Finally, I pull the roast out of the pan and let it “rest” on the cutting board for about ten minutes before letting Jason go at it with the carving knife.

I made the second of the two roasts tonight.  We had kind of a late dinner.  (This is a recipe best left for weekends or early-release school days if, like me, you don’t like leaving the oven on while you walk to school to pick the kids up.  Unless you enjoy sitting down to eat at 7:30 and rushing the kids through jammie time and teeth brushing and tucking in.)  Roast #2 was as much of a hit as Roast #1.  This recipe/procedure/whatever is going in my recipe box.  Tonight.