Time saver: Phil sells out to the marketing shills and cooks a roast.

So today (Sunday 7 August 2011) is Selaks NZ roast day. Why we need a wine company to tell us to make roasts is a bit beyond me, but hey. I’ve been meaning to do make roast beef with yorkshire pudding for quite a while, so I’ll jump on the gravy train (sorry) and do it today. I don’t know enough about roasting beef to go offering advice to anyone (though you’re welcome to share yours with me!) so there won’t be recipe for this one.

When I was growing up it was almost always Dad who made roast beef, I think it’s one of the things he really enjoys making and worked well. As kids we always thought the best bit was the yorkshire pudding, and I’m still pretty partial to them. (Straight out of the oven, covered in delicious gravy… who would eat peas when there’s yorkshire pudding to eat?)

If it looks good I’ll put some pictures up. If it doesn’t we’ll have poached eggs for dinner and I’ll delete this post…

Update – complete success!

It all worked brilliantly and my wife ate so much she says she wants to spew… (One note about the picture – the meat looks quite pink in it. It was definitely medium-rare, but not as pink as that in real life. Blame the camera and my photography skills rather than the food.)

As it was, I was too busy carving and serving to take any photos at the time we ate, but I went back and plated up some leftovers. Note the complete absence of yorkshire pudding. As per Dad’s style, I cooked them in a muffin tray, making 12 small puddings. And yes, we ate them all before I got around to getting the camera out.

I cooked a sirloin roast, using this recipe from the NZ Beef & Lamb website as the base. As per Jamie Oliver’s instructions for consistently good gravy I put the whole thing on a vegetable trivet while roasting in the oven. It must have worked, because the gravy was fantastic.

For the veges I just chopped up 3 potatoes, about a quarter of a pumpkin, a large kumara and a couple of parsnips. Put it all in a roasting dish, then covered in olive oil, mixed in a little garlic and thyme and then seasoned with salt and pepper. Roasted at 200°C for about 45 minutes.