I’ve cooked a lot of beef roasts and there weren’t that many of them I was proud to claim, until now. This recipe has never, ever turned out poorly. I have essentially dumbed down a beef bourguignon recipe. This recipe has a few less steps and way less active cooking time required. You can vary the recipe with the variety of wine you use and how much of each ingredient you use as well.
Start by thinly slicing a large yellow onion into a dutch oven with some olive oil in the bottom. Add salt and cook until golden in color.
Next add mushrooms, carrots and cut bacon. Cook until the mushrooms start to brown. I don’t have an exact on any of these ingredients. It’s whatever I have and feel like cutting. I only had 2 carrots when I made this roast. The roast before it I used 5. Completely up to you.
Remove everything from the dutch oven, season the meat and brown on all sides.
I use a Hudson Bay Beef Spice mix from Savory Spice Shop.
Make sure you flip the meat. You may add butter at this time if the pan is dry.
Perfection! Add the onion/mushroom/carrot/bacon mixture back to the pan with the meat.
Now add the wine. Whatever red variety you have on hand. I have used Malbec, Merlot, Cabernet, etc. Red wine and beef, you pretty much can’t go wrong here. I add wine until there is about a 1/2 inch in the bottom of the pan.
Cook the wine until slightly reduced and add beef broth until the roast is covered.
Bring to a boil.
Cook in a 275 degree oven for about 6 hours. You can do longer or less time. I’ve never had it turn out badly.
August 8th was a big day for us. It started early, well to be honest we just never went to bed. We got the pig ready Friday night and Saturday at 1a.m. it was on the grate cooking. Ok, let me start from the beginning.
We cooked our pig in a sort of makeshift grill made from cinder blocks and expanded metal. A roof was fashioned from metal sheeting and 2×4’s. Holes were drilled in certain blocks to fit rebar supports.
We ordered our pig from a butcher fairly close to where we live. They went and picked up the pig and butchered it. Unfortunately they did not cut it right, gave us the wrong pig (our pig went to someone else and the pig we ended up with was even bigger than expected) and then laughed and blamed the whole thing on us. As if we are responsible for them writing “split” instead of “splayed” and giving us the wrong pig. We won’t use them again. So it started rough. We salted the pig up and waited for Husband’s family to come assist in pig surgery. We could not have the pig split like that, it wouldn’t flip well at all. So wire was used to sew it up.
We used hardwood coal to keep the temperature in the pig around 260 degrees.
Coals were placed into the corners of the pit as seen here.
There was no wind when we started the pig and getting the coals going was difficult. It came up fierce in the morning though and the coals were burning hot and fast. Everything else was also blowing away. I tried to get some sleep and woke up around 8 with Daughter’s foot in my face. We went out and visited the Pig and brought Husband breakfast. All was good until the turkeys arrived. They were biting us, trying to get on the table and eat the food and generally testing our limits. We ended up holding a fly swatter and whacking them until they gave up and went away, temporarily.
This is after 8 hours of cooking.
Then Husband went to bed and I babysat the pig. I tried to watch a movie but……
I gave up.
After 14 hours of cooking the pig was done. Everything was set up and we awaited guests. The party was wonderful. However, we have TONS of left overs. We will be eating pig for the rest of our lives I think.
Oh, here is the pig being consumed by guests. The legs came off on the last flipping.
Daughter had a grand time once she decided she was ok with eating Pig. It took some doing. She felt like they were friends and wouldn’t eat it to begin with.
We had some rain and quite a bit of wind which graced us with a lovely rainbow and a beautiful sunset.
I’ve been slack with several parts of the property lately and you can tell. The flowers beside the house have been completely taken over by canadian thistle. Oh my. A thorny, pain filled mess of a fast spreading nightmare. What was a girl to do?
The thistle had set seed and the seed heads were beginning to open. So the obvious solution, to me, was to collect the seed heads and burn them. That’s what I did!
So we started burning the seed heads on our S’mores making plate. The wind was a a bit too severe to keep flaming pieces of plant material there though, so we moved them to a bucket and had some fun!
While we didn’t use the seeds for a s’mores roast I thought I’d include pics of how we make s’mores in Wyoming Winds. Yum!
