concerning kitchen snobbery: Recipe #2

Today I am going to take a perfectly good pot roast and I'm going to pour pepsi and canned soup and onion mix all over it and then I'm going to eat it. Now, don't you wish you were me?


OPTIMISM IS KEY!!! Haha.


On a side note when my husband came home from work I asked him to try the salad and he liked it. In fact he liked it so much he said he would try it with the mayonnaise and be my guinea pig. Now that's love. Reader, I held him to it and this morning he ate it with mayonnaise. He chewed thoughtfully and then said "not bad, you should try this." I love him, so I did, and I discovered that he is either the kindest man in the world or has no tastebuds. I left him cheerfully smearing mayonnaise on his jello salad and went to prepare dish #2.


So, first things first. I refused to buy the requisite $12 pot roast for what I can only imagine is going to be a kitchen disaster and so I am halving the recipe. And here is the recipe:


3 lb. pot roast
2 10.75 cans fat-free, low-sodium cream of mushroom soup
1 envelope dry onion soup mix
2 16-oz. bottles diet cola


Place meat in slow cooker. In large bowl mix together mushroom soup, dry onion soup mix, and cola. Pour over roast in cooker. Cover. Cook on high 6 hours.


Not a complicated recipe. The sauce mix to pour over the meat was a watery pale brown with onion flakes floating in it. Clearly not something to make for company. I should point out that I used regular sodium reduced fat cream of mushroom soup, which I need to take into account when tasting it as it might be saltier than it should be. Mind you, how do you really ruin a recipe like this. You've already poured Pepsi on beef.


What I've spent on the recipe is as follows:


1.5 lb pot roast - $6.05
Cream of mushroom soup - .99
Onion soup mix - .79
Pepsi - $1.57

Now the whole point of this experiment was to try recipes I would usually turn my nose up at and keep an open mind about them. Somewhere, someone likes this food and even if it sounds disgusting to me I should be able to make and eat this stuff without judging before I do so. I went out and picked these recipes based on how out of my comfort range they were. And that's why I really do not want to say this. This was the best pot roast I have ever had. I am wracking my brain for something bad to say about it and here is what I've come up with.

1) It was too salty. This is my fault because I used full-sodium soup. They said half sodium, and I'm sure it would have been better if I could have found it.

2) It did not need 6 hours. I took it out after 5.

3) It would not serve the number of people it claimed unless you serve really really tiny portions. The full recipe said twelve servings, and the total is probably closer to 4-6 servings. My halved recipe served two of us with a bit left over.

Other than that I have nothing bad to say about this. Nothing.