Okay. In order to make sure I actually write about the culinary experiment/experience that's about to happen in my kitchen, I'm posting this now...pre-cooking. To maybe (at least) guilt myself into finishing this particular documentation.
So...on Monday, I made a pot roast in my crock pot. A crock pot roast, if you will. Being my second pot roast in as many weeks, I decided to do something a bit different than the last time: use red wine as the liquid base instead of broth. Unfortunately, since I'm not a qualified food scientist (yet), I failed to correctly calculate the probability of the wine reducing enough to not be alcoholic within the confines of my cooking method. I cooked the roast (along with some red potatoes and carrots) on low for about 9 hours. When I finally took the lid off and bit into a potato...it just tasted like a wine-soaked potato. Sadface. The roast was spectacularly flavored (in my opinion, at least), but alas...the vegetables were a failed attempt at ingenuity.
See here, the potatoes displayed thusly, in all their glorious failure:
So I saved the sauce (which is mostly wine, with a bit of beef juice and other seasonings), which is now reducing on the stove. I'm going to cook it down until it's pleasant to taste and won't get me tipsy, then perhaps add the veggies and make a soup. Add in a squash or something. Who knows?
Stay tuned...hopefully I'll have the next post up tonight. Or tomorrow. No promises. ;)
P.S. Thank you, interwebs, for entertaining my desire to write as though I have a large blog following with readers hanging on my every witty comment.
It smelled pretty awesome the whole time it was simmering. Eventually it got to a place where I didn't pucker my face at the alcohol content of this brothy substance. But what I really had to do was add some sugar. Brown sugar, specifically. 
So now I have a sweet-beefy-winey marinade of some sort. Might do some steak or something with it. Might not do anything with the potatoes because I don't think I'll have the time to mess around in the kitchen in the next couple of days. But that's ok, because I got 2 more AWESOME things done today! Firstly, I roasted a butternut squash: 
Which means soup...or squash cookies...or other general yumminess to occur in the future. I'll probably portion it out (it's all pureed now and refrigerating) and freeze it, for later use. Yummmmmsquashyum. And secondly/lastly, I made Russian tea cakes! 
For the first time! 
They turned out pretty good, though next time I'll probably make them more ball shaped (I was silly and followed the recipe when it said to smush the cookie-balls down a bit before baking them). And I'll make sure to have more powdered sugar on hand so I'm not so stingy with it. So YAY! I posted again, just like I said I would! Which means you (the reader/s) will hopefully check back for more. And, more importantly, I will hopefully have posted something more. ;) G'night!
