Recipe Guinea Pigs and Slow Cooker Vegetable Beef Roast recipe

Printable Recipe


Are you a Recipe Guinea Pig?  If you eat dinner at my house, you may become one!

My husband always harasses me because I like to try out new recipes when we have guests over and it usually ends up being the missionaries from our Church (who we feed about once a month).   Why do I need to use our guests as my recipe Guinea Pigs?   There are 2 reasons I try new recipes out on guests, one related to determining if it's us or the recipe, and one in case it's truly a bomb (I'll post about a recent bomb soon).

Reason 1:  I have picky eaters so sometimes I don't know if the reason my family doesn't like a recipe is because it's a bad recipe or because it's just not for our family.  By trying out new recipes on guests, I can get an opinion from outside my picky family.  My kids may be saying Yuck but they say that a lot.  So I use the guests for a non-biased (hopefully) opinion.

Reason 2:  I have a family of 4 with 2 of those being young picky girls.  If the recipe is horrible, whether it's due to my cooking skills or to the recipe itself, what do I do with the leftovers?  I've tried recipes that made a 9x13 pan full and we've eaten maybe 1/3 of it and decided we didn't like it.  As much as I am the one who normally eats the small quantities of leftovers, if it's a bomb, I just can't eat 2/3 of a pan of something that didn't work for us.  Enter guests :)  And instead of dividing the recipe by 4 (sort of), it's divided up further.  He he.  And just for the record, my last bomb involving guests, I ran around the corner right after dinner and bought ice cream for everyone after I threw away the leftovers.

So tonight was an even bigger experiment.  I had a roast planned for tonight's dinner.  But when I pulled out my recipe, at the deadline for getting the roast into the crock pot in time, I discovered that I was missing half the ingredients for seasoning the roast.  Then I remembered that I had recently downloaded this new cookbook from Country Cooking to my Kindle Fire, surely it has a beef roast recipe.  I quickly found one titled "Vegetable Pot Roast" and it called for lots of fresh vegetables which I didn't have - BUT I did have them in THRIVE, and other products!  So instead of just trying out a new recipe I had found - it was a recipe that I modified on the fly.

Here's the cast of characters...

 You may notice that not all of these are THRIVE products.  I started purchasing THRIVE in November 2011 and have built up quite a collection - but I haven't gotten everything.  Plus being a good steward, I need to use up what I already had.  And since I used up the Mushrooms and my Onions are getting low (plus the onions are dehydrated rather than freeze dried), my next THRIVE order is going to include these items.

Step 1 - I tossed my roast into the crock pot and sprinkled with salt and pepper.  Then I covered it with the mushrooms, onions, THRIVE FD Celery and carrots.

 I then added THRIVE Tomato Powder and remaining spices.

Pour the water over the top of everything and give it a stir.

Because I was running out of time, I cooked the roast on High for 4-5 hrs and pulled it out as the missionaries arrived for dinner.  Sadly, I forgot to take a picture of the roast until after we started putting it on plates.

Here's my plate, served with my favorite coleslaw and Roasted Green Beans (made from reconstituted THRIVE Green Beans).

The verdict from my Recipe Guinea Pigs?  Yum!  Even my "I don't like meat" 5 y/o asked for seconds of the roast!  My  "I don't like vegetables" 9 y/o asked what was in it and when I said there were lots of vegetables with the roast, she said "I couldn't tell there were vegetables with it."  My husband also gave it rave reviews.  The missionaries cleaned their plates but didn't ask for seconds so I'm going to count them as neutral.

Notes for next time - With a little more time I would probably brown the roast before putting it in the crockpot - just for the fun of it.  And I might mix all the dry ingredients together in a bowl before adding them to the crock pot rather than the layers.  I also will put more of the vegetables on the platter with the meat and maybe sneak them onto some unsuspecting daughter's plate.


So here's the recipe, with links to the ingredients as THRIVE products.

Slow Cooker Vegetable Beef Roast

Printable Recipe

• 1 Small (about 2 To 4 Lb. Size) Beef Roast
• Salt And Pepper
• 1 cup THRIVE FD Mushrooms
• 1 cup THRIVE FD Onion
• 1 Tablespoon THRIVE FD Celery
• 2 Tablespoons THRIVE Carrots
• ¾ teaspoons Dried Minced Garlic
• 1 teaspoon Thyme
• 1 teaspoon Chili Powder
• 2  Bay Leaves
• ¼ cup THRIVE Tomato Powder
• 2 teaspoons THRIVE Beef Bouillon   OR 2 Beef Bouillon cubes
• 2-½ cups Water

Sprinkle the roast with the salt and pepper on both sides.
Place roast in crock pot. Spread mushrooms, onions, celery and carrots over the roast. Sprinkle garlic, thyme, chili powder and bay leaves on top. Add tomato powder and bouillon cubes, then pour water over top. You may wish to stir everything up before putting lid on the crockpot.
Cover crockpot and cook on low for 7 hours or on high for 4-5 hours.