Roast beef in Slow cooker

Happy Australia Day!!

Today is a public holiday here in Australia, so yesterday I went to the supermarket to pick up some salad stuff and all the meat was half price as the supermarket is closed today!

I got a roast silverside of beef and had no idea what to do with it so I did what all good cooks do and phoned my Mum!
She said cook it SLOWLY and it will come out lovely and tender she usually just salt and peppers it and puts in in the oven for 1 hour on high then 2 hours on low. I asked if I could add slivers of garlic like you do with a roast lamb and she said "It can only make it tastier"

Ingredients

1.5kg Roast Silverside of beef
3 large potatos
4 small carrots
3 small parsnip
5 small garlic cloves of garlic
half a leek, chopped
half a red onion, chopped
half a stock cube worth of stock (about 300ml)
good slug of red wine (about a glass and a half)


So I linned my slowcooker pot with thick slices of potato about 1cm thick.

I cut little holes in my roast and poked 2 cloves of garlic slivers into the holes.
Covered roast with ground black pepper. (I decided to leave the salting till later as I read somewhere that salting meat in slowcooking can make it dry out.)

Then browned off my roast on the stove top until all sides were sealed and set the garlic slivered peppered roast on the potato.

In the pot on the stove I fried the leek, onion and remaining garlic and added to the slow cooker, along with the carrot, big chunks, and parsnip, quartered.

I now put the stock and wine in the pot on the stove and brought it to the boil scraping all the meat brownings back into the liquid and poured this over the meat and veg in the pot.

cooked on high for 3hours turned and cooked for another hour.


Then it looked something like this!

I removed the meat and let it rest for 10 minutes while we made the gravy (I say we!! the boy made the gravy)


To make the gravy we scooped some juices from the pot and boiled up in a frypan we added BISTO!!! (british gravy powder that after hunting everywhere for we discoved it in the convienience store across the road from our house)

so anyway added 2 teaspoons of bisto straight into the pan juice mix and brought to the boil whist stirring to thicken.

This is the best gravy I've had in Australia.


The finished meal was compleated with frozen peas and cauliflour cheese. no roast puddings this time, the oven wasn't on just the grill to brown the top of the cauliflour cheese so the house stayed nice and cool.

The meat was so tender it was hard to carve without it crumbling. we left it cooking for so long as after 3 hours cooking we remembered the cauliflour cheese stilll had to be made so gave it an extra hour cooking time.

It was very very tasty. The parsnips were slightly soggy and lost there flavour but everything else was delish.

Will definatly do this again!!