Three Beautiful Things 12-24-2023: Debbie's Anniversary Request, Fixing a Chuck Roast Dinner, An Evening with the Kennedys

1. A little while back, Debbie asked me to baste a beef roast for our wedding anniversary dinner. She specified that she wanted potatoes and onions with the beef and asked me not to include carrots or celery. So, on Saturday, I bought a chuck roast weighing about five pounds, thinking I could cut it in half and fix another pot roast another day. Debbie suggested, however, that I cook the whole roast and that we have a stroganoff on another day. 

2. So, that's what I did. I seasoned the chuck roast with rosemary, oregano, cumin, thyme, cinnamon, chili powder, salt, and pepper. I also pressed about eight cloves of garlic into a quasi paste and to put on the top of the roast. I seared the top and bottom of the seasoned roast, poured a puddle of beef bouillon in the bottom of the Dutch oven, covered the puddle with sliced onions, and put the roast on top of the swimming onions. 

I covered the Dutch oven and cooked the roast at 325 degrees. After a couple of hours or so, I put pieces of Yukon gold potatoes seasoned with Montreal Steak seasoning in the Dutch oven along with more chunks of onion. I checked the potatoes about about a half an hour or so later, and since they were cooked through, I took them out and put them in a sealed bowl.  

After about four hours, the roast was pulling apart and Debbie and I agreed it was ready to eat. 

I steamed a bunch of broccoli and each of us made ourselves a bowl of beef pieces, Yukon gold potatoes and onion chunks, and some broccoli. We used the delicious liquid in the bottom of the Dutch oven as a kind of gravy. 

That was our 26th anniversary dinner. 

3. We relaxed into the evening by watching several episodes of a CNN documentary entitled, American Dynasties: The Kennedys. 

The series reaches back to the ascendence of Joseph Kennedy, Sr. in American political life, focuses on his and Rosemary Kennedy's dreams for their children and how they prepared them for lives of service, the tragedies that beset the Kennedy family, on John and Robert's ascension to becoming essentially co-presidents in 1961, and the many challenges John F. Kennedy faced as a president, with emphasis on Cold War tensions and the intensifying demands by Blacks for equal civil rights. 

We didn't finish the docuseries, but we know that the awful story of both John and Robert's assassinations is coming up next.