Slow Cooked Good Natured Family Farms Chuck?  Sure!

Remember last time we talked about the Hen House CSA? Well, now we’re going to get serious. What are we going to do with all our take!

This week’s bag star was, in my opinion, the Good Natured Family Farms chuck roast. A nice little piece of meat with plenty of gorgeous marbling just begging to be slow cooked in my ceramic

Dutch oven.

Begging.

If it were up to me, I’d go with an intense Asian flavor base: soy sauce, ginger, garlic, rice wine vinegar, bean paste, diced red pepper, celery and bok choy. This would be served over a bed of egg noodles and a side of green beans sautéed with few drops of sesame oil.

There’s only two problems with that: one, my wife’s not a fan of that flavor profile and two, in the CSA was some lovely chard and kale that I’d like sauté and serve with the roast. So, we’re going to go with a more American flavor base. We keep the soy sauce (for the umami) and garlic (because it’s garlic.) We’ll add just a little black pepper, a light dusting of herbs and a little lemon to round out the taste. On the side, I’ll sauté the greens in olive oil and season with salt, pepper, and garlic.

Hen House’s Good Natured Family Farms Simple-But-Delicious Chuck Roast

You will need:

• 1 Good Natured Family Farms chuck roast (at least two pounds)
• Salt and pepper
• 1/4 cup flour
• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 1/2 cup soy sauce
• 1/2 cup beef stock
• 6 cloves garlic
• 2 teaspoons each dried basil and dried time
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice or lemon zest

1. Combine a liberal amount of salt and pepper and flour.
2. Coat the entire chuck roast in the flour mixture and let sit.
3. Add the olive oil to the skillet and let it get hot over medium-high heat.
4. Cook all sides of the roast for 45 seconds or until brown.
5. Place the meat in a Dutch oven, ceramic pot or your crock pot.
6. Add the soy sauce and stock so that the liquid comes up at least half way on the meat. If there’s not enough liquid, add more stock (or water if you don’t have stock.)
7. Add the garlic, herbs and lemon to the stock.
8. If you are using a crockpot instead of a Dutch oven, set the crockpot for low and cook 8 hours. Flip the meat halfway through.
9. If using a Dutch oven/ceramic pot, bring the liquid to boil over medium-high heat, then cover and set the heat to medium-low.
10. Cook for 3 hours, flipping the meat occasionally and ensuring that the liquid continues to boil gently.

Enjoy!

(Oh, and clearly the fact that I’ve not paid into the CSA program in exchange for this series of blog posts means that this is a sponsored post.)

Hen House CSA

It’s been a while since the Blog Well Done family has been part of a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program. If you’re not familiar with CSA programs, you basically buy a share of a locally-owned farm’s output in return for a guaranteed amount of their output during the season.

The farm’s happy because they have cash flow and your belly is happy because you get some good vittles.

Yes, I said vittles.

Anyway, for years, Hen House has been featuring a CSA program that’s a little different than the CSAs we’ve joined in previous years. Their CSA program allows you to take shipments of several different local producers offering not just vegetables and fruit, but rice, meat, eggs, and other items, too.

I like the program a lot because it allows me to try different items from local producers that I might not otherwise eat. It also has helped the BWD family overcome our biggest objection to the CSAs of old: lettuce.

No, seriously. Our past CSA delivered us a lot of food we really like and a whole bunch of fancy lettuce we absolutely wanted nothing to do with. See, Mrs. WellDone loves salads, but doesn’t like bitter lettuce and I’ve always felt that lettuce isn’t food. Lettuce is what food eats.

Points!

How does Hen House get around the tyranny of lettuce? They have a point system for their CSA that means I never have to eat lettuce again! Instead of receiving the same bag of goods each week, at Hen House I get so many points and I can trade those points around to buy just the foods I want (or more likely, just the foods BWD, Jr. will eat.) Anyway, it’s a nice touch that I’d heard about, but never really considered until standing in front of the display for the first time wondering if I wanted 1 Good Natured Family Farms chuck roast or like 7 more bunches of chard. (Spoiler alert: I got the roast.)

With all that said, the next few months are going to be delicious. I was already pretty enamored with Good Natured Family Farms’ meats (I have no affiliation with them, by the way, I just like their stuff.) Now, I get to eat a lot more of it every week and tell you all what I did.

So please check back. There will be plenty to enjoy!

(Oh, and clearly the fact that I’ve not paid into the CSA program in exchange for this series of blog posts means that this is a sponsored post.)