Dinner With Friends

Tonight I asked some friends to stop over to have dinner with us, as well as my mother-in-law, so I wanted to make sure I had enough food to go around. I picked up a really beautiful beef roast at the meat counter today and put it in the slow cooker to serve with some mashed potatoes. I also served some broccoli, and a beet-greens salad with garlic vinaigrette.

Effortless Sunday Roast w. Horseradish Sauce

Ingredients:

For the roast
3-4 lb beef roast
1-2 cloves of garlic
2-3 cups beef stock
1 small pkg button mushrooms
1 pkg pearl onions
2 bay leaves
Salt & pepper, to taste
A sprinkling of paprika

For the horseradish sauce
A spoonful of good prepared horseradish
A good sized dollop of mayonnaise

Place the roast into the slow cooker and sprinkle with salt, pepper, chopped garlic, and paprika. Clean and slice the mushrooms and place in the pot. Peel ** and drop in the pearl onions then drop in the bay leaves and pour the beef stock into the pot. Make sure you don't completely cover the roast with liquid -- you don't want to boil the roast here. Cover the meat about 3/4 of the way. Turn the slow cooker to either high (for about a 4 hour timeline) or low (for a 6-8 hour timeline). Now, forget about it. Serve with rice, mashed potatoes, bread and butter, maybe a green salad ... whatever sounds good or you have on-hand.

Stir the prepared horseradish and mayonnaise together to serve with the roast. This comes together so nicely with the broth from the roast once it is on your plate. Be sure you have some bread to sop it all up!

**A note about pearl onions: If you can find frozen pearl onions, go ahead and use them here. They are already peeled. Otherwise, blanch the onions in boiling water for about 3 minutes then place them in cold water to shock them for easy peeling. The skins will come off very easily. Of course, feel free to chop a regular onion or two into large pieces instead;)

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