Beef Chuck Shoulder

Beef chuck shoulder was on a ridiculous sale, so I gave it a shot. I couldn't find any recipes I liked online (onion soup mix is for dip, and cream of mushroom soup is for never, so...) so I ended up free-handing it and it turned out amazing.

2 1/2 lb beef chuck shoulder roast
At least one bulb of garlic, peeled
Roughly 2 lbs carrots, washed and cut into reasonable sized chunks
4-6 thin skinned potatoes, washed and cut into reasonable sized chunks
3/4 cup balsamic vinegar
2 tablespoons honey
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
Fresh ground pepper
Beef broth. I had a partly used carton in the fridge and tossed it all in there

Put the meat into the bottom of the slow cooker liner, then cut the carrots and potatoes and tossed them in on top, being careful to not overdo it on the vegetables to meat ratio or overfill.

Mix together the vinegar, honey, soy sauce, and Worcestershire sauce, and pepper. Pour over the ingredients already in the crock pot. Pour on the beef broth and make sure the amount of liquid is sufficient to mostly or entirely cover the meat at least. Add water if worst comes to worst. Then cover it, and shove it in the fridge overnight. In the morning, whip it out, put it in the slow cooker base, and put it on for 12 hours on low. Longer is fine. By the time you get home, the beef will be falling apart and the garlic will be very soft. Make a gravy with the liquid if that's your thing, but it's fine if you don't.

In retrospect, the overnight marinade in the vinegar mix was definitely part of the magic here and I wouldn't omit it. The meat has a sauerbraten vibe going on from the vinegar, and while I shook some Italian spices over it, the end result had a light tumeric-like flavor despite not having any spice like that in it. Despite on paper being a 16+ hour recipe, I whipped it up after dinner, started it while getting my coffee, and came home to it done. Given that the whole "prep the night before" thing is pretty common in use with slow cookers, the possibilities of taking advantage of the overnight soak are worth considering.

Short thoughts: The Twenty One Balloons

Thinking about food has me thinking about the steampunk-before-there-was-a-word-for-it Newberry winner The Twenty One Balloons. A fantastical tale of an old but spry teacher with a retirement plan of... Floating around the world in a balloon for a year. (Yes, the Pixar film Up probably owes something to The Twenty One Balloons). It's a short by adult standards, charmingly illustrated, easy to find, and surprisingly influential tale, so I have to recommend reading it yourself before you are totally spoiled by this post.

Anyway, the bulk of the book is taken up by a description of the society on a small island the balloonist crashes on, a la Gulliver's Travels or Dinotopia (definitely a common genre there, drawing on similar tropes. Would be a good but very accessable paper to compare and contrast The Twenty One Balloons and Dinotopia). Here's a link to a discussion of 21B, spoilers ahead: https://www.thebooksmugglers.com/2015/07/decoding-the-newbery-the-twenty-one-balloons-by-william-pene-du-bois.html

That all said, the idea of a society where all families are equally wealthy in a situationally based way, and all quite well off by outside standards such that they have leisure to invent and create, but end up settling on a kind of service economy, where each family cooks for the others in turn, because while they have plenty of food and all the modern conveniences money can buy or their minds invent, *good* food still requires human cooks, who must be paid in kind, with fine prepared meals in turn. It's an obviously unrealistic society, and not independent of the greater global society, but again, it makes a good starting point to discuss possible alternative ways of organizing a society. The Rats of NIMH and some Babar books would be some other good comparison literature.

Anyway, that's a lot of talking about everything else interesting about 21B, when it was the food that really stuck in my mind today.