Fooooood!

 For somebody with 53 cooking videos on YouTube it occurs to me I don't post much about cooking. In the past week we've made a couple fantastic meals:

This is partridge pie, remember these guys?

You really only get the breast meat of a partridge so we used all 3 to make the pie, we like meaty pies.

Angie made some cream of chicken soup to which we added a bunch of vegetables. The cool think about fowl pie is that you can't really screw it up. In the past I've used canned cream of potato or cream of chicken or cream of mushroom soup, then add cooked meat and vegetables. Actually we've made some really good pies by using leftover stew.

The top on this pie is a commercial pie dough but I've done a bunch of these by making biscuit dough and laying it on top. The pie is pretty thick so you don't really need a bottom crust. If you wanted to make one in a round pie plate you could use both crusts. In the past we've used the kind of crust that comes in a pie plate with one as the bottom and another on top.

This is a top round roast that was on sale at the grocery store this week. I've cooked these before and had them come out tough so for this one I aimed for "low and slow". My buddy Jon who owns "The Butt Stops Here" BBQ truck in Swanzy, NH (best BBQ in the world) mentioned cooking at 250F so thats what I aimed for. In reading recipes online (after I started naturally) I realized I probably should have started at high heat to brown the meat. After two hours the meat was mostly cooked so I jacked the heat to 350F for another 15 minutes. At that point my meat thermometer was around 150F or about medium-rare. I pulled it, wrapped in aluminum foil and let it rest for half an hour. You can see in the pics its pretty much medium, maybe a little beyond.

Plated fancy and more tender than any roast I've cooked before.

Next time I do this I'll make 2 changes. First I'll reduce my temp some. Our oven tends to run hot so although I set for 250 it was probably 300. Next time I'll put in the oven thermometer and aim for more accuracy which will probably extend cooking time. 

Second I'll pull it at more like 140F. Looking at a meat chart online they suggest 135F is medium rare but we were reasonably happy with the results so I don't want to go too far. Remember that the center will continue to cook some (carry-over) while the meat is wrapped.

What say you folks? How do you do roast beef? I like to keep things simple, I know I should have a rack, etc but I really can't be bothered.