Had To Move To Plan B

Look at this picture. Do you notice anything? Is there something missing here? Any one??

Yeah, that's what I thought. I've been looking at this hole in my kitchen toy cupboard for a few days now. For the life of me, I can't think of what it is. Bread machine? Bottom right, check. Bread slicer, steamer? Top left, check. George Foreman grills? Bottom middle, got it. Waffle irons? Top right, yeah, got two of them. What the heck is missing on the bottom left?

I even called Ron into the kitchen. I know I don't have that many toys in the kitchen, or at least not as many as I'd like, but c'mon, not even I would leave a space this big without storing something in there. Ron came over and looked and also drew a blank. No idea what was there. He even thought that perhaps that spot was always empty. Yeah, he's a guy; he didn't see anything wrong with a huge hole in a storage cabinet!

I let it go. I figured it couldn't be too important otherwise I'd know right off what was missing.

Fast forward a few days. I took a beef roast out of the freezer downstairs on Saturday to defrost it for Sunday. I thought, throw a roast in the crock pot and be done with working hard to get dinner on the table. I do love my crock pot!

Sunday morning, I was up and started working with the roast around 11:00 am. I had the roast seasoned and browning in a pan. That's when it happened. I went to the cupboard to get my crock pot out and what did I find? The empty hole in the cupboard! DUH!

It all came back to me. We had my family's Christmas dinner on Tuesday, December 29th. We carried Ron's famous vegan ranch beans to the party in my crock pot! When we left, we left the crock pot there with promises of getting together soon to retake possession of the crock pot. Yeah, who thought, huh?

So here I am, a roast already seasoned and browned and it's 11:30 am. What the heck am I to do? The old me would have made someone drive the seven miles to my brother's house to pick up the dang crock pot. But the new me came up with plan B. I decided to put the roast in a baking dish, put some tented foil over the roast and throw it in the oven on low and let it cook that way all day. I am good, huh?

I set the oven at 250 degrees, put the roast and some beef and veggie stock in, tented the foil and threw it in the oven. I honestly had no idea how long to cook this so I warned the guys that dinner could be ready at any time; not necessarily our regular dinner time.

I peeled and cut some potatoes and carrots to add into the roast at about 3:00. When I took the foil off of the roast, I could see the bone in the roast sticking out of the meat and the meat looked like it was falling apart already! I had to get the veggies in. Once I have a plan, it's hard to do a plan B on more than one portion of any activity! I've already used my one plan B up for making dinner!

I threw the veggies in and hoped that the meat would hold up until the veggies cooked. By 4:30 I could smell dinner all through the house. I was afraid any longer and dinner would just burn. So, like the old people that we are, we had dinner last night at 4:30 pm!



It was freakin' awesome! This had to be absolutely the best roast I've ever made. The meat absolutely fell apart and the veggies were cooked perfectly. We may have eaten on old people time, but we sure ate like we all had healthy appetites. Here is what was left when we were done.

So while I didn't have my crock pot, my plan B sure did work out well.