Cleaning out the pantry

We've had some difficulty using our Bountiful Basket in the last couple weeks. Halloween, soccer practice, soccer photos, birthdays, chi omega commitments, etc, etc, etc has all taken over our lives and we've ended up having Little Ceasars $5 hot and ready on more than one night. More than one night, a week. 

Today is Veteran's Day and I got to hang out with the boys today - more on that in another post.  It was great to take advantage of a brother-nap to do some cooking today.  I always do pot roast in the crock pot and have never, ever done it in the oven so this was new.  I just didn't have enough time to wait for the crock pot.  Anyway, I had apples, carrots, potatoes and celery to get through so my goal was to use them all for dinner/dessert.

Oven Pot Roast

 

3-4 lb pork roast, mine was boneless

1 can cream of whatever you have on hand soup

3 potatoes, cubed

3 carrots, chopped

3 stalks of celery, chopped

salt and pepper to taste

1 cup water

12 oz soda, whatever you have on hand is fine...i obviously used diet coke because it's amazing

 

Put roast in baking dish and spread veggies around it.  Sprinkle S&P over meat. Combine soup, soda, and water and pour it over roast and veggies. Bake for 3 hours on 350 and you're done.

 

You can really use whatever veggies you have on hand but these are my go-to pot roast veggies and just happened to be the ones i had leftover from my baseket.



 

Baked Apples

6 small apples
2 cups of diet orange, lemon-lime, or similar soda

Core apples and cut in half.  Place apples, skin up in baking dish and pour soda over apples.  Bake for an hour at 350 and wait for the amazing smells.

Your house will smell amazing when you bake this, especially if you use a sweeter apple. I have no idea the exact type of apple I used but I think they may have been baking apples.  I've done this with tart apples as well and they always turn out great.  If you want them mushier, do them for an hour. If you want them more 'sliceable' stick to around 45 minutes.  I used diet sierra mist, but anything like diet orange or diet ginger ale would be great too.