Pepperoncini Roast Equals Easy Sunday Dinner

By Laurie

I love pepperoncini peppers so much I often eat them out of the jar. I also, in spite of wishing I didn't, love red meat. So when I decided it was time to make a proper Sunday dinner in my new place in my new slow cooker (yes, single people need to eat too and own small appliances) I figured I couldn't lose with a combo of the two, right?

Pepperoncini roast recipes popped up everywhere I looked on the Internet, recently. I don't remember where I first saw one, but I saw Jonna tweeting about making it the other night, and I figured I'd give it a shot.

It's actually really easy. My personal, entirely unscientific approach to recipes is to decide I want to make something last minute while I'm out, go to the grocery store with 10 percent power left on my iPhone, and frantically Google recipes and hope the connection holds out before my power dies so I'll make sure I have the right stuff to make whatever I'm thinking of. Then I deal with the aftermath.

I am a model of efficiency and time management, is what I'm saying.

On Saturday night, I did just this. I bought a decent roast, punched "pepperoncini roast" into Safari, and prayed. Do you know how many pepper roast recipes there are on the Internet? There are a ton. And most of them come down to this:

Put roast in pan.

Dump jar of pepperoncini peppers on top.

Maybe some salt and water too, sure, eh, throw those in there.

Cook in the slow cooker for several hours, and you're done.

Surely it had to be more difficult, I thought. Right? I even looked up the blog famous Pioneer Woman's drip beef sandwich recipe, which I recalled contained pepperoncinis. Even she didn't take it too far from that basic place. So I forged ahead.

It is that easy.

Because I'm an overachiever I cut some slits in the roast and tucked some garlic in there, because I firmly believe that everything is better with garlic. Also I don't trust a recipe with fewer than five ingredients, apparently.

I put the roast in the cooker, dumped the peppers on top, added some Italian seasoning, and looked at it for awhile. It looked like this.

Then I left, because someone promised me it was okay to leave the house with something cooking. (What? I was trained not to leave heat sources unattended.) But I really needed to go to the gym.

I returned to the most delightful aroma in my condo, and this:

After an hour or so, because it was so tender and I'd gotten hungry and sawed off an end of the roast for other purposes which I may or may not detail later, I hacked it up for further simmering and future use, like so:

Oh my.

Some goodness, can't lie.

So that, friends, is the first dish I've made in my slow cooker in my new kitchen, and I'm pretty sure it'll be good for a couple lunches and dinners all week. It's a slight step up from eating the pepperoncinis solo out of the jar, but I'd be lying if I said that's not what's first on my grocery list for the week.

[Images by Laurie White]