Pepperoncini Roast Beef

There are a ton of little things you can do for yourself to improve the quality of your life that you may not consider on a daily basis.  Buy a body wash that is good for your skin and doesn’t smell like a twelve year boy trying to score with the college sophomores his older sister invited over on Thanksgiving break.  Invest in some good cutlery - Cooking is exponentially more satisfying when you can re-enact Kill Bill scenes on your vegetables.  Get a good bed – rest is important, yo.  If the quality of your sleep improves, the quality of your life improves.

Yah, spray that Axe body spray on your balls
and feel the burn, little Timmy.  Sweat all you want,
you’re never getting invited to that pillow fight

Anyway, all of this is to say that the Head Chef of my Relationship made an executive decision and chose  to improve my life last weekend by upgrading my crock pot to something that is full size and programmable.  Prep your food, chuck it in the crock pot, and come back 6-8 hours later and indulge yourself in something delicious.  And let’s be honest, something delicious will always improve your life.

Since she was so super excited about this new kitchen contraption, she wanted to prove how amazing my life would be going forward.  I tried to convince her, like, look, we already bought it, you can stop trying to sell it to me.  Let’s just stick with the dessert you were going to make, of the buffalo chicken pull apart bread, or the litany of other delicious food ideas you’ve been pitching.  But no, crock pot dish it had to be. 

I want a knife that handles peppers like
Uma Thurman handles Japanese boys.

Ultimately we landed on something that doesn’t really have a name.  So we’re going with Pepperoncini Roast Beef.  And, let’s be honest, it sounds and looks like a terrible idea. 

Judging a dish that looks like it was dreamed up on the spot can be a bit tricky.  If the dish is terrible, is it the fault of the recipe (which the chef created) or the fault of the chef for doing a terrible job of following the recipe?  And if the chef created a recipe so complex that she couldn’t follow the recipe and the end result was terrible, is it because the chef is a terrible chef or a terrible creator of chefables?  Chefables being a word I made up for the overarching category of things that chef’s would create.  Because there’s totally not a word for that yet.  Can I copyright “chefable?”  I feel like I may have stumbled onto my billion dollar idea.  Anyway, let’s get back to the point.  If you make up your own recipe, and what you deliver sucks, it’s a lot your own damn fault.  Yah, feeling a little buyer’s remorse on that crockpot yet? 

So let’s get down to brass tacks… or peppered beef… or whatever.  Let’s start at prep difficulty.  The dish itself really doesn’t seem that hard to make, honestly.  Like a drive by fart, really:  Fire and forget.  Throw all your chefables into the crockpot, set it at high for six hours, and go take a nap. Yah, that’s right Sharon, we take naps… lots of naps.  But there was the whole mashed potato thing that added some difficulty.  Which brings up a tangential question:  At what ratio of sour cream to potato are mashed potatoes no longer mashed potatoes?  Cause I’m pretty sure the ratio got pretty damn close to 60/40 barely in favor of potatoes.  The recipe may say “add sour cream to taste,” but what it means is “use all the unopened sour cream, open new sour cream, use all that, then wonder why there isn’t more sour cream.” 

At least the final result looks beautiful, right?  I mean, don’t get too distracted by green stuff.  A lot of people may not be into the pepperoncini, and that’s cool.  Feel free to exclude them, it’s a free country.  But the plating, yo.  Gorgeous.  Potatoes and beef and gravy and a splash of random color… and you get to put that in your mouth, bro. 

And what happens when it’s in your mouth?  First of all, that beef comes out so ridiculously tender and juicy.  I mean, I had leftovers the next day and when I stabbed it with the fork it squirted juice at me.  When was the last time you had roast beef like that?  The answer is probably never.  Cause your crockpot sucks and doesn’t have a timer.  The au jus is amazing as a seasoning, and the gravy with the sour cream potatoes… Add it all together and it’s a really solid three.  Now you’re wondering… three?  What the hell?  You were just talking about the all juicy and the au jus-y and the gravy and you’re going to give it a three?  Well, umm, the pepperoncinis.  They were…  Umm.  They weren’t terrible… they just seemed… out of place.  The interesting thing is that they pick up so much of the beef flavor that the peppers are actually pretty tasty.  But, still… just… out of place.

Which brings us back to the chicken and egg type conundrum.  Is the chef’s execution or the flavor of the dish to blame?  I have no earthly idea, so they both get threes.  I could have given the chef’s execution a five and the flavor a one, but that assumes that the chef doesn’t suck at following instructions to combine chefables.  Maybe she does suck, and the execution should be a one and the flavor is a five in spite of her worst efforts.  I don’t know.  Either way, combine them, average them, and three is the result. 

It looks weird going in...

But let’s wrap this bad boy up.  Remember when I was talking about simple things that can improve your life?  A good, homemade meal can dramatically improve your life.  So when this thing averages out to a little better than three and a half, you have to remember that I was accustomed to eating Taco Bell and microwave burritos that easily rated a one (unless you poured queso over the top of them, then you’re pushing a two and a half).  So, yah, when I say three and a half what I’m saying is I ate those leftovers every night for a week.  Was it spicy biscuits and gravy good?  No.  But it sure beat the fuck out of Taco Bell.

Biscuits and Sausage Gravy

Biscuits and Sausage Gravy

Due to its general deliciousness, it’s super easy to forget that gravy is essentially liquefied

animal fat, flour, and milk.  It’s like killing the animal wasn’t quite enough; we needed to render its fat into a delicious dressing to further fuel our carnivorous rage.  Which is why pigs probably exhaled a collective “oh shit” when human beings discovered biscuits and gravy. 

There are few things better in this world than breakfast food.  The problem is if you want the really good stuff you have to get out of bed at a decent enough hour to either make it yourself or at least make yourself presentable for other human beings so you can go to a restaurant (favorite breakfast place right now, by the way, is Ronnie’s Restaurant… get a cinnamon roll).  Both of those options are just massive pains in the ass; it’s the weekend and I have zero intention of getting out of bed before 11.  Unless golf is involved. 

But for you, my four faithful blog readers, I made the sacrifice of getting out of bed early last weekend so my girlfriend could cook me breakfast.  As I sat there on the couch watching Samurai Jack, I pondered whether my heroic sacrifice of sleep was worthy of some sort of medal or Federal Holiday; the experience was that traumatic.  But you’re worth it, dear reader, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.  Also worth it:  That giant plate of orange tinted biscuits and gravy. 

Here are some things this week’s recipe taught me.  First of all, frozen biscuits are ok to use.  I wrongly assumed that because they were frozen it would mean, somehow, they weren’t fresh.  Blame Wendy’s I guess.  But either way those damn biscuits came out as close to perfect as I could imagine.  The only way they could have been any better is if I didn’t have to get out of bed before 11 a.m. to eat them. 

Second, I learned that if you substitute spicy sausage into your recipe, you could get some unexpected color results.  In this case, the gravy came out with a slight orange tint that I would not have expected.  You’re probably thinking “Aluminum Chef AJ does not tolerate deviations from standard presentation.  That’s probably going to hurt the score.”  Normally you’d be right, but look at that photo and tell me you’re not thinking about licking your computer screen right now.  No, there will be no orange penalty on this day. 

That's a spicy piggy...

Actually, it’s hard to find anything to penalize in this dish.  Chef’s execution?  Adding spicy sausage instead of the standard was a flair that melted my stomach’s heart… which is totally a thing that will earn you a five every time you can pull it off.  For once I wasn't adding Frank's Red Hot or Tabasco sauce to my breakfast.  Jimmy Dean's hot meat was all the spice I needed to start my morning with a kick.

Put a price tag on this, I dare you.

Prep Difficulty?  This dish is so easy I was just texting the process to myself as I checked in on the kitchen every few minutes.  Sure, there’s some judgment involved (adding flour until the gravy is thick enough for your liking), but like I said in the intro:  Grease, flour, milk and stir.  Don’t like it spicy?  You're wrong, idiot.  But it's still a simple switch.  Even the frozen biscuits eliminate the terror of ripping open those pressurized tubes of bread that double as IEDs in times of civil unrest.  The most complicated part of this recipe was deciding what to call the stove top pot that was used, and I think we can all agreed I nailed that.

This was pretty tasty...

Cost would be a perfect 5 as well, because how can you put a price tag on this pork-laden sorcery?  Of course we lose a bit in opportunity cost.  Yes, the biscuits and gravy were delicious, but I’m never going to get back that opportunity to sleep in on Saturday morning.  And even though I know you completely sympathize with my pain and suffering, you probably think it's hardly fair to blame the chef for the early morning; and you’re likely right.  Especially when you consider that there was a nap immediately following breakfast.  Yep, I’m living the dream, folks. 

Of course, what it all comes down to is how rocking the party is in your mouth.  Well, this was a party that should have been shut down by the cops.  I'm legitimately sad for vegetarians (and people of faiths whose diets are restricted from pork) everywhere because they are not invited.  It hardly seems right to give such a simple, non daring dish a perfect score in taste; but sometimes things are perfect because of their simplicity.  This is definitely one of those times.  

Let's be honest, the whole dish was perfect.  And maybe it's a case of the chef knowing her

audience and being sick of getting mediocre scores; like "fuck you chubby, you want something delicious? BOOM!"  If that's how this happened, i'm not even mad.  It could have come with a note saying "made with all the spite I could muster," and I still would have eaten every bite and licked the plate.  And that's how you know you earned a 5.

Sausage gravy over flaky biscuits; the perfect way to remind pigs why they are where they are on the food chain.