To my low-fat gourmet mother’s sheer horror and Don’s giddy delight, I made Ree’s pot roast a couple of weeks ago. I’d seen her post on my RSS feeder, and through some trick of fate happened to find a nice chuck roast on sale virtually the very next day. Amazing! Oddly, for a guy who generally seems to be as meat-and-potatoes as possible, Don actually prefers the vegetables that come with pot roast to the meat itself. He’ll take a couple of bites of meat to satisfy propriety, and then load up his plate with the veggies. Weird, I know.

The rosemary I used came fresh from my own plant, which is shockingly not dead. Even more shockingly, it is doing moderately well, even under my benevolent neglect. I think Don’s watering it occasionally out of sheer pity. I used a little too much in my enthusiasm; we were picking bits of rosemary out of everything, but it still tasted very good. Mashed potatoes with diced scallions thrown in at the last minute made a great bed for the meat, veggies and sauce. All in all it was a successful meal. So successful, in fact, that I never got a picture of the finished product — just a few of the prepped ingredients.  I like the picture above for its alternate focus; most of the pictures I took were of the onions and carrots, the “main ingredients,” with rosemary, a simple flavor element, off in the background.  Of the three I posted on my flickr account, this one has gotten the most views.