Pot Roast Gone Wrong

We've all seen it happen in the movies.  Girl invites everyone over for a huge turkey dinner, but girl forgets to turn the oven on and at the last minute the turkey, which is the main event, is discovered raw, cold, uncooked, chilling in the oven.

My mom did this a few times when I was a kid, but I had never done this before...seriously, 'forget' to turn on the oven, are you kidding me?

Go figure, for my thirtieth birthday I found myself making this very mistake....

When I was younger and I pictured myself as an adult, I pictured cooking a family style dinner for my friends once a week...we'd have a designated day that we would all gather around a home cooked meal, play games, drink wine, etc....

Now that I'm an adult I've come to terms with the fact that this would be a very expensive pastime, not to mention a huge logistical problem, trying to appease everyone's food likes and dislikes, and food allergies/odd diets would be a huge undertaking.  So instead I strive to do this only as my birthday celebration...

I like the challenge of cooking for a larger number of people, planning out the time that everything has to be done so that it is all ready at the right time, and inviting others to try some of the recipes that I've discovered.

This year I decided to go simple, just a simple pot roast with roasted with the classic potatoes, carrots, a couple types of bread, and strawberry lemonade smoothies...

Everything was going smoothly....I managed to make it to three grocery stores within the hour...got a 3.5 pound pot roast specially cut for me (three tresses to hold the darn thing together...and it barely fit in my dutch oven)...put it into the oven right on time....set an alarm to cut up the potatoes and carrots and add them to the oven an hour and a half before dinner...but when I went to add the veggies I discovered the oven was completely cool....I'd set the temperature but didn't turn the stupid thing on! To make matters worse, I had already set the dinner time a little late in the evening, so now, dinner wouldn't be ready until 10pm.


One by one as people arrived I broke the bad news "I'm so sorry, should we go out to eat or wait out the 3.5 slab of meat in the oven?"  They chose to wait it out (thank goodness...what would I do with all that food otherwise....we ate dessert first, played a game or two then delved into dinner....

However being that dinner was two hours later than I intended, I was a little short on food.....Everyone seemed happy with the meal, but there were no left overs which means everyone was probably a little ravenous and a little bit more of everything would have been better. C'est la vie.... I guess you can't win them all.