Brian approved my suggestion for a dinner of roast beef and mashed potatoes and further accompanied me to the store to select the roast and pick up some onions. Brian thinks everything is better with onions. He's only partially wrong. But that's another topic entirely.
I called my mother, who supplied me with excellent instructions for fixing the meal in my slow cooker and all things looked successful four hours later when I taste-tested the broth and poked the meat to see if it was bleeding. It wasn't and the broth needed only a little more seasoning. I was pleased.
The upcoming faux pas portion of this endeavor may have escaped into general ignorance but for two things: Brian's sister's fiancé arrived immediately following the error and Brian was still laughing, and then Brian's mother visited within the next couple days and he found it amusing enough to tell her. So now I figure the rest of my social world may as well be included.
I cooked what turned out to be a rather good roast, particularly considering that it was my first roast. My mother, however, never measures anything when she cooks and always gives me approximate proportions in her instructions. She had directed me to fill the slow cooker "about half way" with liquid for the broth. This I did, but I ended up with it filled a little more than three-quarters with the broth. By the time I added the potatoes, onions, and carrots a couple hours later, the broth fully engulfed the two roast rumps. This was not ultimately a problem except that to me the entire concoction looked very deceptively like soup.
A short aside: It has been easily fifteen years or more since my own mother has cooked this same meal for me, so I literally did not recall how she served it. I remembered only that she used to cook cabbage in hers, and I always hated the taste of boiled cabbage. It was such an awful thing to include in an otherwise delicious meal. The cabbage had this horrible habit of half floating in the broth bowl and dripping everywhere. Any attempt to eat it ultimately soaked the rice in your rice bowl and no amount of rice and beef in the same mouthful negated how terrible cabbage tasted.
How lovely, now, to be in charge of what goes into my broth! Cabbage was banned. Carrots were delicious. Potatoes an absolute necessity. And onions by request. I'm fine with that. I pulled out the roast, sliced it on a cutting board, and placed it in a deep bowl over which I ladled generous amounts of broth and vegetables. I set the bowl in front of my rather groggy recovering handsome and returned to the kitchen to fix the peas he wanted as a side and wait expectantly for the feedback that would come after a bite or two.
Silence reigned.
Not only was there no feedback, but I wasn't even hearing the scrape of the spoon against the bowl. I stopped and looked at Brian who was staring deeply with furrowed brows at the bowl before him. I asked if everything was all right. He turned to me and just stared with a puzzled smile beginning to creep across his face. He stood up and carried the bowl back to the kitchen. He hadn't even tasted it yet! What could possibly be wrong?
"Sweetheart, you're so strange. It's roast beef! It's not a soup."
For heaven's sake, if it's not supposed to be served as a soup it oughn't to be cooked as a soup! Whose fault is that? Certainly not mine. I've been racking my brains since then for experiences to reference on how this meal is normally served. But now for the life of me, I cannot remember how my mother served roast beef. I know there was rice . . .
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