A Shot of Espresso

Dinner tonight was fine, but would have improved drastically with a bit of patience and planning. See, I had a spur of the moment decision to do a coffee themed meal. I found a recipe for an espresso rubbed roast and before I even figured out what I wanted for side dishes, I'd fixed it up and threw it in the oven. That was mistake number one. Finding side dishes involving coffee proved to be far more difficult than I originally thought, especially considering I'd already used the Chipotle Coffee Bean recipe.

Mistake number two is that I was so excited about trying out the roast recipe that I completely negated common cooking
practices and roasted instead of braised a very cheap and gristly cut of meat. Even at rare it was that sort of tender/tough combination that lets you know that had this been a prime cut of beef that it would've been perfect, but instead it's sort of chewy.

Aside my foibles, the flavor of this roast is great. You can definitely taste a roasted coffee musk to it, but it's not
overpowering. In fact, I think you're likely to taste the molasses hint from the brown sugar before the espresso. Over a fire pit this would probably be fantastic. It's not good enough to be my favorite, but it was nice to try something that's very different from what I'm used to. What really set this apart was the gravy. Bar none, the gravy for the Espresso Rubbed Roast was the best gravy I've ever had.

If you're wondering why I'm talking so much about this roast, it's because the side dishes were lackluster. Yams with Ginger Sauce had potential, as basically any yam dish does, but didn't really wow me at all. I like the subtle heat from the pepper-infused oil, but (and this is no fault of the recipe itself, I suppose) the yams were very bland. I'd never bought an organic yam before tonight and my current experience is that they're small, tasteless little brothers to the GM version.

The Orange and Beet Salad seemed as though it had potential. Vinaigrette and beets should
taste like pickled beets, right? Oranges are just tasty anyway, how can you go wrong? If I haven't already admitted so, I'm not really a salad fan. I love my vegetables, but salads don't do it for me. I'd like to chalk my dislike for this salad up to simply disliking salads in general, but I can't. It's just not good. The dressing seems lost in some strange contrast of the beets and oranges, which I thought would go well together, and the walnuts and greens just faded into the background. We didn't even bother keeping this for leftovers; it went straight to the garbage.