Local blade roast

As a mom to a large family, you can guess that I'm usually pretty busy.  My favourite meas to prepare are quick easy and if possible, one pot so that they're also easy on clean up.  Here's a family favourite that can be thrown together at lunch time, placed in a low oven and forgotten until supper time.  If I'm doing this as I'm running out the door in the morning, then I just lower the temperature from 300F to 250F and let it cook for the day without a worry.  Don't have time to brown the roast?  Forget about it.  It's really nice, and I always take the time to do it, but it's perfectly fine if you just season the meat and place it over the vegetables and water.

This dish is nearly self cleaning and takes all of 20 minutes to prepare (with the 10 minutes of browning).  Isn't it wonderful to know that as soon as you get home the warm scents of a beautiful meal waiting for you?

(Unfortunately, the internet doesn't have a scent function yet... I'm told that they're working on it! lol)

Blade Roast with vegetables au jus

1 lg blade roast (a shoulder roast with bone in)

2 medium onions, diced

8 small potatoes, quartered

4 garllic cloves, smashed
5 medium carrots, halved

1 medium turnip, diced about the same size as the potatoes

1/2 medium celery root, small diced

7 cups water

Thyme from my garden
Salt to taste
1 tbsp butter

Food sources:

Roast from Norm's Butcher Block on Hanwell Rd.  He gets his meat locally.
Vegetables from the Jolly Farmer from Northampton, NB (Turnip and celery root, bought a week ago, were labeled local at my neighbourhood Co-op...)
Salt, is currently Sifto Salt, however I have found out that there is a salt mine in Sussex, so I figure I'll be able to get local salt.  So you can imagine that I'm happy...
Butter from Northumberland, a New Brunswick dairy company.

Preheat the oven to 300F. 

Have your root vegetables chopped about the same size, except for the celery root which will be diced small to extract as much flavour as possible.  Place all of the vegetables and thyme in the bottom of a roasting pan.

Season the roast with a little bit of salt.  Melt butter in a large hot pan on medium high heat.  Add the roast and brown for 5 minutes without touching.  Make sure that both sides of the roasts have been seasoned.  Flip the roast and brown the second side for 5 minutes.

Cover the vegetables with about 6 cups of water - enough water that most of the vegetables are covered.  Place the roast on the vegetables.  Throw the remaining cup of water into the pan that you browned the meat it, and rub the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon to deglaze the pan, add this liquid to the roast then cover and place in the hot oven.  Cook at 300F for 3-4 hours. 

Serve family style on a large platter.  Reserve the liquid from the roast, and serve as a dipping sauce in warmed ramekins.

The 100 mile challenge - Fredericton Style

So we've all been hearing about how we should be eating foods from within 100 miles. It's both ecological - read lower carbon footprint, and likely healthier (as long as you avoid that large conglomeration meat processing plant in the next town...)

The easiest thing to do is to find the area that is covered in my 100 mile challenge... Here is the map. The hard part is to find the sources for simple, un-thought-of ingredients, that we find everyday at the grocery store but that come from away...

Where will I find a source for local salt? Do I have access to a local leavener? I know that I can make my own natural sourdough with local flour and water, but where can I find baking soda? Baking powder? And spices? Will I find vanilla? Will I find bay leaves? We certainly don't have the climate for citrus... What about meat? What fruits & vegetables will I find locally? What grains?

And then we need to consider the seasons.  We have a long winter and a short growing season...

So here goes the research and preperation. I'll blog periodically to let you know what sources I find, what problems I run into and what the family thinks of our progress.