Wednesday, April 15, 2020

Maurice Brandied Roast


This slow cooker roast got its start as a variation of Beef Bourguignon. Here we use a nice brandy to slowly braise the chuck roast. Vegetables are cooked separately as a way of insuring better taste and doneness! It is named to honor LGBT hero E. M. Forster. Read about him for easy dinner conversation!


A nice chuck roast, slow cooked on a bed of chopped onion in a braising liquid of beef stock and brandy. A true comfort in these uncomfortable times.


Ingredients:
2 tablespoons vegetable oil (or extra-virgin olive oil)
salt + pepper (to taste)
1 package brown gravy mix
2.5 lbs beef chuck roast
½ cup beef stock
1 large onion rough chopped
1 cup brandy

For the Optional Gravy
1½ tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 Tbs beef stock (cold)

Directions:

First wipe out and spray the slow cooker, set to low.
Heat 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil or olive oil in a large skillet over high heat.
Pat the pot roast with paper towels to dry; remove any excess visible fat.



Brown the pot roast on all sides in the hot oil, then remove to a plate.



While that browns, do a rough chop on the onion. You want big pieces. Scatter them in the cooker.

Place the browned roast on top of the onions. If the pot roast does not fit comfortably in the pot, cut it into two or three pieces.
Pour the dry gravy mix on top of the roast and smear around with your hand to make a coating.



Carefully pour the ½ cup of beef broth and full cup of brandy around the sides of the beef.

Cover the pot and cook on the LOW setting for 8 hours, or on the HIGH setting for about 4 hours. The roast is very tender.

Remove the roast to a serving platter and tent with foil; keep it warm until serving time.

During the last hour of cooking you will have plenty of time to crank up the oven to 400 degrees. Line a baking sheet with foil. Stir the broccoli with some olive oil and spread on the sheet. Let roast for 30 - 40 minutes.
The very tips and edges should have a touch of black. This is NOT burned, this is caramelazation that makes the green vegetable so delicious.

If you wish, this is also the time to boil potatoes and mash them.
Remember the meat should rest for at least 7 minutes! Do not forget this step. The resting time is great for making the gravy.

Skim off the fat or strain the liquids into a fat separator.
Pour the strained liquids into a saucepan. Bring the liquids to a boil over high heat. Reduce the heat to medium-low and continue cooking until reduced to about 1 to 1½ cups. Taste and adjust the seasonings.

Combine 1½ Tbs flour with 2 Tbs of beef stock; mix until smooth and well blended. Stir this into the reduced liquids and continue cooking until thickened.



What a comforting meal for my Master to share.

socialslave

To satisfy and restore.
To nourish, support and maintain.
To gratify, spoil, comfort and please,
to nurture, assist, and sustain
..I cook!

Please buy slave's cookbook:

The Little Black Book of Indiscreet Recipes by Dan White http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F315Y4I/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_vAT4sb0934RTMvia @amazon



============================
E M Forster




Edward Morgan Forster (1879 – 1970) was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. Many of his novels examine class difference and hypocrisy, including A Room with a View, Howards End, and A Passage to India. The last brought him his greatest success. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 16 different years.

Forster, born in London, was the only child of "Lily" and Edward Morgan Llewellyn Forster. He was registered as Henry Morgan Forster, but accidentally baptized Edward Morgan Forster. His father died of tuberculosis in 1880 before Morgan's second birthday. In 1883, he and his mother moved to Rooks Nest, Hertfordshire until 1893. This served as a model for Howards End in his novel of that name.

Forster inherited £8,000 in trust (the equivalent of about 1.25 million dollars today) from his great-aunt in 1887. The money was enough to live on and enabled him to become a writer.

At King's College, Cambridge, between 1897 and 1901, he became a member of a discussion society known as the Apostles. They met in secret, and discussed their work on philosophical and moral questions. Many of its members went on to constitute what came to be known as the Bloomsbury Group, of which Forster was a member in the 1910s and 1920s.

Forster was gay. In 1906 he fell into his first and unrequited love with Syed Ross Masood, a 17-year-old future Oxford student he tutored in Latin.

After leaving the university, he travelled in continental Europe with his mother.

In 1914, he visited Egypt, Germany and India by which time he had written all but one of his novels. As a conscientious objector in the First World War, Forster served as a Chief Searcher (for missing servicemen) for the British Red Cross in Alexandria, Egypt. Though conscious of his repressed desires, it was at this time, while stationed in Egypt, that he "lost his respectability" to a wounded soldier in 1917.


In the 1930s and 1940s Forster became a notable broadcaster on BBC Radio and a public figure associated with the Union of Ethical Societies. In addition to his broadcasting, he advocated individual liberty and penal reform and opposed censorship by writing articles, sitting on committees and signing letters.
Forster was openly homosexual to his close friends, but not to the public, and a lifelong bachelor.

He developed a long-term relationship with Bob Buckingham, a married policeman. Forster died of a stroke in 1970 at the age of 91, at the Buckinghams' home in Coventry, Warwickshire. His ashes, mingled with those of Buckingham, were later scattered in the rose garden of Coventry's crematorium, near Warwick University.


Forster had five novels published in his lifetime. Although Maurice was published shortly after his death, it had been written nearly sixty years earlier. He never finished a seventh novel, Arctic Summer.

His first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread was published in 1905.
Next, Forster published The Longest Journey in 1907.
Forster's third novel, A Room with a View (1908), is his lightest and most optimistic.

Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Room with a View can be seen collectively as Forster's Italian novels. Both include references to the famous Baedeker guidebooks and concern narrow-minded middle-class English tourists abroad.

Howards End (1910) is an ambitious "condition-of-England" novel concerned with different groups within the Edwardian middle classes and the Basts, struggling lower-middle-class aspirants.

Forster achieved his greatest success with A Passage to India (1924). A Passage to India was adapted as a play in 1960.

Maurice (1971) was published posthumously. It is a homosexual love story that also returns to matters familiar from Forster's first three novels, such as the suburbs of London in the English home counties, the experience of attending Cambridge, and the wild landscape of Wiltshire.

The novel was controversial, given that Forster's homosexuality had not been previously known or widely acknowledged. Today's critics continue to argue over the extent to which Forster's sexuality and personal activities influenced his writing. Maurice was adapted as a film in 1987.



Forster was President of the Cambridge Humanists from 1959 until his death and a member of the Advisory Council of the British Humanist Association from 1963 until his death. His views as a humanist are at the heart of his work, which often depicts the pursuit of personal connections in spite of the restrictions of contemporary society. When Forster's cousin, Philip Whichelo, donated a portrait of Forster to the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association (GLHA), Jim Herrick, the founder, quoted Forster's words: "The humanist has four leading characteristics – curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race."

Forster's two best-known works, A Passage to India and Howards End, explore the irreconcilability of class differences. His posthumous novel Maurice explores the possibility of class reconciliation as one facet of a homosexual relationship.

Sexuality is another key theme in Forster's works. Some critics have argued that a general shift from heterosexual to homosexual love can be observed through the course of his writing career. The foreword to Maurice describes his struggle with his homosexuality, while he explored similar issues in several volumes of short stories.

Forster's explicitly homosexual writings, the novel Maurice and the short story collection The Life to Come, were published shortly after his death.


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