A family affair

One of the challenges of my attack on my recipe collection is working around the family schedule. Two working adults, two busy school-aged boys -- thousands of families have the same problem.

Sometimes I break down and dinner looks like this:

This usually happens on Wednesdays, when soccer practice starts the same time I would otherwise be telling the boys to set the table. I'm not proud, but I am human.

Thursdays are a little different. Soccer practice ends just before dinner time -- I make sure of that, I'm the coach that night -- and I generally employ one of two methods to get the kids fed. One is to delegate the responsibility to my husband. I'm very fond of this method, and use it regularly. He's a pretty good cook himself, and unlike me, is capable of figuring out what to make on the spur of the moment and making it something other than pasta.

The other method is the good old slow cooker, which is what I used today, although with a little help from my spouse. My husband picked the recipe, for red-cooked rump roast, out of Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook by Beth Hensperger and Julie Kaufman. Red cooking, the cookbook explains, involves making a sauce that can be reused on other meats and gaining flavor each time.

You first prepare the red sauce, which involves soy sauce, water, and a bunch of spices. My husband kindly did this for me last night to save me the trouble this morning. Not that it looked particularly hard, but I will never quibble with anything that gives me more time to savor my morning coffee.

The sauce heats in the slow cooker for an hour before the roast is added to cook for eight hours. The rump roast, also on sale this week, looked to be much better quality than Monday's skirt steak. Still scarred from said skirt steak, I lowered the roast gently into the hot liquid... gently... gently... and SPLASH. Soy sauce and scallions all over the counter. But, no burns.

One of the great things about most slow cooker recipes is that once everything's in the pot, you can walk away until it's done. Not quite with this one. In this case, I was supposed to turn the roast after four hours. This isn't a big deal if you're home all day, which I was expecting to be at the time I agreed to make the recipe. Three hours into cooking, though, I got an emergency work call and had to bolt. So I made a slight adjustment and turned the roast just before I left.

After work, I ran the kids home to change into soccer clothes and turn the roast back to the first side. The timing worked perfectly; it was supposed to cook four hours on each side, and there was one hour left in the cooking. Plus, it smelled great and it was already fork tender.

After this, my husband took over. I had to go to a meeting after soccer, so he served the roast with some potatoes.

THE VERDICT: It smelled great. I liked the inside flavor a little better than the outside, which was unusual for me.  My husband and oldest son loved it. My youngest son was on the fence. I'd probably make it again, but possibly cook it a shorter time. It seemed pretty tender after six hours.

Further experimentation: We saved the cooking liquid, as recommended.