The recipe was this one: To Die For Crock Pot Roast.
My roast was about 3 pounds, rather than the 4-5 pounds recommended in the recipe. And I added potatoes, carrots, and onions, none of which are in the original recipe (despite the photo from the website). A number of reviewers on Food.com refer to how salty their roast was. Mine wasn't salty. In fact, it needed salt--and it wasn't very flavorful.
My mistakes:
- To cut back on the saltiness, I cut back on how much of the dry seasoning mix I used. I rubbed my pieces of roast (I'd cut it into quarters before I started, so I could divvy it up easily for leftovers) with the seasoning mix. Then I added the half-cup of water the recipe called for. I added vegetables. Then I took another half-cup of water, added some of the seasoning mix, and poured that over the vegetables. The crock-pot (it's a 3½-quart size) was full to the top.
Now I know that crock-pot cooking will tone down the seasonings substantially, so you need to use more seasoning than you think--or partially cook the meal, then add seasoning.
- I didn't cut my vegetables small enough, and they took an eternity to cook.
For the leftovers, I thawed/heated the roast and vegetables (and the liquid from the pot) for each serving. Then I put everything back in the crock-pot with more of the seasoning so that the seasoning might flavor the food and so that the vegetables would be more thoroughly cooked.
The vegetables did eventually cook, and the seasoning flavored both the vegetables and the meat. It never became too salty.
But by the end, you didn't taste anything but the seasoning. Onions, carrots, potatoes, and meat all tasted the same--"seasoned".
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So how do you make a crock-pot pot roast with all the vegetables and get the vegetables to cook thoroughly and to taste like themselves? Do you cook things separately and then combine them? (That sort of defeats the purpose of a crock-pot, doesn't it?) Or is a pot roast just something that isn't going to work well in a crock-pot if you want your roast to have vegetables.
