A nice slow cooker beef roast

Photo by Taste of Home

I've been trying to buy very little meat recently.  We don't eat a lot of meat anyway, but do have several meals which include meat in the course of a week (at least one for the church potluck and one for a family meal on Saturday night).  So I've been trying to use up what's in the freezer.  At this point I think we are down to 2 packages of bacon (we use a half package for five of us most Sundays with homemade waffles; other weeks I make homemade sausage); 1 ham; and 2 chickens.  All that to say that last week, I decided to cook a small beef roast I had found in there.

I wanted to use the slow cooker to free up more of my day, and in looking through a December back issue of Country Woman magazine (the same one where I found all those great cookie recipes I've been posting about in Mrs. T's Christmas Kitchen), I saw a recipe that looked promising.  It's called Burgundy Beef, which may explain why I hadn't noticed it before.  In looking over the recipe, I found it called for very little burgundy (a quarter cup) and also noted that beef broth could be substituted.  Usually when a recipe calls for red wine, I use cranberry juice instead, so that's what I decided to do.  I didn't have any mushrooms on hand, but decided to substitute sliced onions.  I also didn't want to serve the dish over noodles, so I peeled and quartered 5 or 6 small potatoes and added them to the cooker with everything else.

This turned out really well and the gravy had fantastic flavor.  Mr. T says we must have this again when we find a small beef pot roast in the reduced meat selection.  Your family might enjoy it too -- it's a hearty, comforting meal on a cold winter day.