Cookbook Cooking: Old School Pot Roast

Comfort food in all its glory from the cookbook Half Baked Harvest Every Day

For a while I’ve had the idea to start a cookbook club. In my fantasy, I’d pick a cookbook each month from my collection, somehow there’d be a good amount of other people involved who also think cookbooks are awesome and we’d share photos of dishes and thoughts on recipes on some nice little corner of the internet — already my soul feels full if that’s all it ever was. But if by chance there were enough people in and around the Ann Arbor area who also loved cookbooks, there’d be a monthly potluck where we’d all eat each other’s food and talk about, I don’t know, probably cookbooks. 

Right now there’s just me, so I am a cookbook club of one. 

In my kitchen at this moment there is pot roast cooking in the oven, and damn if it doesn’t smell downright homey in here. I don’t remember eating pot roast as a kid, although I’m sure I did. But it probably got lumped into the other anonymous tasting meat meals of the 80’s. I’m looking at you, meatloaf. This pot roast is absolutely delicious though, I just tasted it. It’s cooked slowly for almost four hours, with carrots, onions, mushrooms, thyme, rosemary and other stuff, creating a sauce that is more than ready to be soaked up by mashed potatoes. I’m hungry for this meal.

It comes from the cookbook Half Baked Harvest Every Day, a gift from my sister for my birthday last summer. I didn’t start cooking from it until the fall since it feels to me like a cold weather cookbook with lots of pastas and pizzas and meat and melted cheese. The author, Tieghan Gerard, lives in the mountains of Colorado where the summers are short and the ski season long, so it suits that climate. It also very much suits Michigan winters which are gray, gray, a glimmer of sun, sleet, snow if you’re lucky, then gray again, on repeat, through March.

A few years back I started putting a checkmark on each recipe I’d cook from a cookbook. That was definitely one of my better ideas, right up there with starting a cooking journal nine years ago. Sometimes I make a note if a recipe is extra delicious or I made it for a special occasion, but for the most part the checkmark alone is just a nice little reminder from my past self to my present self that yes, you made this, even if you have no memory of it. 

The checkmarks also make it so I can easily look through this cookbook and know that so far I’ve made the Herb & Mustard Potato Stacks, a Giant Spinach & Artichoke Soft Pretzel, Zuppa Toscana with Gnocchi, Shredded Brussels Sprout Salad with Brown Butter Walnuts, Coq Au Vin Blanc Meatballs, Salty Chocolate Pretzel Rye Cookies, the Lemon Tart with Vanilla Sugar twice and now, Mom’s Pot Roast. Flipping through the pages at least ten more recipes caught my eye, but really if I could, I’d just like to cook every single one. I haven’t been let down yet, all those recipes I would make again.

This cookbook is full of comfort food and I like that about it. The older I get the more I’d like all my meals to have the essence of comfort food, although that doesn’t mean it has to be pot roast or braised pork shoulder or chocolate pudding every night. For the most part I cook what I crave, and that act of listening to my body, to feel if the desire is for a big crunchy salad or snickerdoodles or coconut curry or chicken wings, is to bring comfort to myself. And by bringing comfort to myself I in turn bring comfort to those around me because as they say on the airplanes, put your mask on first. In this case, that mask is a big delicious meaty pot roast served over mashed potatoes on a sleeting winter Michigan night. You’re welcome family.

before & after