I love my mother.  I really do.   There are some meals, however, that require planning, prior preparation and proper ingredients.  Pot Roast comes to mind as one of those.  Another would be chili from dry beans.  Or perhaps deep fried turkey from a frozen (or live) turkey.  These are NOT dishes that you decide to cook for dinner at 3pm and expect to eat by 5pm without EXTREME miracles.

So when I saw my mother pulling two still half-frozen pot roasts (about 1.5 lbs each) out of their hidden thawing spot around 3pm this past Saturday, I panicked for a moment.  My heart raced.  Surely she didn’t intend those for a slow cook!  We’d be eating at 9pm (not my favorite meal time)!  I quickly rescued the poor cuts of meat from their hiding spots and trimmed the excess fat (confirming two things in the process–first that my mother has not changed her habits with regards to sharpening knives since my last visit, requiring that I spend time tending to that task before I could actually trim the fat; and second that the meat was indeed partially frozen still).  The panic set in just a touch deeper.

I raided the spice cabinet and the panic went from ‘hey, this could be bad’ to ‘oh no, maybe eating out is easier’.  I talked myself down, grousing at my mother for the sad state of the spices selection (”Who doesn’t keep BASIL?”, I ask blithely; her response floors me, “I don’t really like basil”.  WHOA!).    I eventually wind up with my selection–a Cajun spice rub (I don’t generally care for premixed rubs, but this one is from a company I trust–and the reason it was there is because I had purchased it and sent it there in the not too distant past), cumin, and some garlic powder.   I set these aside for later in the process, since I plan to first take care of the little problem of half-frozen meat and about an hour and a half till dinner time (now).

I raid the fridge.  I’m not going to thaw meat in water when there is orange juice available.  I discover that there is also apple juice.  I put in about equal parts of these into what I’m guessing was a quart or maybe two quart pan (probably two quarts, but I didn’t check–it was enough liquid to cover the meat when I was done!).  This got heated to a roiling boil, along with two onions.  Mom’s spice cabinet didn’t include any whole fresh garlic,  but there was some minced garlic in a jar, so some of that went in as well…

Liquid heated, I placed the meat in a bowl, and poured it over…and the cooking process is started.  This also has the advantage of adding a lot of flavor to the meat.  Good flavors.  If I had done the same thing in water, the flavors would have been sucked out instead of being pushed in.  NOT what we want.

I take a break, go for a walk to clear my head and call Big-O (yes I did!).  We talk for a minute and he suggests boiling it.  As we talk, I realize he’s right, and decide to go this way.  Now normally I would cook veggies along with the meat, but I decide that in the interest of a swift meal, it’s better to just cook the meat alone.  What I lose in flavors I gain in speed.  Besides, most of the flavor is in the spices…

Speaking of which, when I get back to the kitchen I find that the spices I had set aside prior to my preparation have been put away!  Ack!  So I dig around again and find the random locations where they’ve been hidden, again grousing.    Spices recovered, I build a bowl full of rub.  I remove the meat from the liquid, find it nicely thawed (it’s now about 4:15–we aren’t going to be eating at 5, but close enough).  I rub the meat down and then sear each side in some oil.  It’s just standard vegetable oil (since that’s all that mom had…), but the cast iron dutch oven she had makes up for some of that.  Searing done, I pour the orange/apple juice concoction that I used for thawing the meat BACK over it and leave the heat on high.  VERY high.

I put the lid on, and away it goes.  45 minutes or an hour later it’s cooked fully, and reasonably tender (not yet falling off the bone, mind you, but it would have been soon).  At that point we had mashed potatoes, corn & other food.

Was it perfect?  No, but it was a dinner win instead of what COULD have been a complete disaster.  With just a bit more time it would have been a great base for chili or another bean-dish by shredding the meat.

Note that most of the liquid that I used ended up evaporating, which was fine–that just concentrated the flavor considerably, leaving a very tasty beginning that could have easily been used as the basis for a gravy, soup or other dish.

Moral of the story, the next time you find yourself in a hurry to cook a larger cut of meat, consider boiling it in something other than water…or better yet, learn to plan ahead!

(As a side note, my family has gotten into trouble several times because someone failed to plan ahead.  It is a well-documented fact that turkeys cook better when thawed–and thawing a turkey takes lots of time.  My family has proven this experimentally.)