At my bridal shower in Montreal almost a year ago, I received the most beautiful and touching gift from everyone – a book of special recipes from friends and family, lovingly put together like a scrapbook by my mother. It’s got my aunt’s “best chicken recipe”, my sister’s favorite party dip, my grandmother’s tomato-and-cheese macaroni dish, and a whole bunch more that I’m looking forward to trying. People get together over food, and having my family’s best and favorite recipes makes me feel closer to all of them, and I’m so grateful for the gift.

Today I attempted my Mom’s Pot Roast in the crockpot. And, because I’ve never met a recipe I didn’t tweak, I tweaked it. Partly because I had a smaller piece of meat, and because I love onions more than Mom does. So here’s my tweaked version (sorry, Mom)!

Easiest Slow Cooker Pot Roast

3 lb beef roast
1 medium onion, quartered
1 can cream of mushroom soup
3 cloves garlic
1/2 tsp thyme
1 tbsp flour
1 envelope dry onion soup mix
1/2 cup water and 1/2 cup red wine

Cook 8 hours on LOW or 4 hours on HIGH.

Mom’s version was for a 5-6lb roast, and so it had an extra can of soup and 1/2 cup more water. It also doesn’t include a chopped-up onion, but I don’t think Mom would be opposed to the idea. I should have tossed in some carrots too, now that I think about it.

I mixed the dry onion soup with the thyme and flour and the squished-through-the-press garlic cloves, and then rubbed it all over the roast. I put that in the crockpot with onions around it, then added the liquids, mixing with a fork so the mushroom soup didn’t stay in one big glob. I rolled the roast around to coat all sides, then it was time to cook it. Here’s what it looked like before cooking:

I leave first for work, so I asked Dave to start it up before he left, so it wouldn’t cook to death. Our crockpot has a timer and it goes to “warm” mode after it’s done cooking, but I still hate having it on longer than necessary. Unfortunately the message got confused along the way because it was put on high for 8 hours, instead of the low that it should have been. Luckily, though, everything turned out fine. It was a little dried out, but not too bad, since the crockpot retains all the liquid as it cooks, and besides, we had a bucket of gravy in there to help us choke it down. 🙂 It was really, really good. Really good. Like, I wish I had a bigger stomach so I could eat more good. Like, wanting to set the alarm for a 3am snack good.