Roti de Boeuf Poele a la Matignon (Casserole Roast of Beef with Aromatic Vegetables and Potatoes)

At the cottage I found a collection of Julia Child cookbooks and couldn't resist trying one of her recipes, after all "Butter is better!!" (If you haven't seen the Julie and Julia movie, that won't make sense). So I settled on this roast recipe as I've struggled with keeping a roast moist.

The recipe covers 5 pages of text and some of it is quite wordy, so here is the condensed version.
- dry the beef and sear when heated oil is almost smoking, can be done in a dutch oven or in a frying pan and then transfer meat to a casserole dish
- sear potatoes in this oil, remove and season (if you are going to cook the roast later, wait to sear the potatoes)
- season the roast with salt, pepper and thyme
- spread over the roast a cooked mirepoix

• mirepoix - finely diced celery, carrots, and onions (I added garlic and green pepper) is fried in butter with diced boiled ham until lightly browned (I didn't have boiled ham, so used bacon)

- cover the meat with suet or pork fat (which I didn't have so again used bacon)

***At this point you can place the roast in fridge and just add 10 min to your roasting time. I found this very helpful as I worked around Levi's naps.

- roast for an hour or until the internal temperature is 120
- remove the meat from the casserole dish as otherwise it will continue to cook, discard porkfat and scrape mirepoix back into the casserole, let meat rest before serving
- test potatoes and return to oven if additional cooking time is required.
- make sauce with mirepoix by adding 1 to 2 c. broth, 1T of tomato paste and salt and pepper to taste (we didn't have any tomato paste, so I added some flour to thicken it and made a yummy gravy instead)
- serve it up!

The ingredients for my mirepoix.

Frying up the mirepoix with the propane stove at the cottage.

Packing on my mirepoix.

Reviews - if you think butter is good, bacon is better!! This is NOT a low calorie meal. The bacon gave the roast a really nice smoky taste that we all really enjoyed. I forgot to baste the roast, so it was a little drier than I'd hoped (but I accept the blame and bacon is not the solution for my lazy cooking habits). I felt the recipe title was a little misleading, since there were no aromatic vegetables included. At the end of the recipe she did include a recipe for sweet carrots, but I wondered if I could have added some veggies to the roast pan near the end of the cooking time. At the end of the day we said a big MERCI to Julia!!