Lazy Friday dinner

I like making roasts. A roast is the kind of dinner that is usually cheap and pretty, and gives my kids the impression that I cook special fancy meals for them. I especially like to make roasts on Friday, because by Friday I'm so tired I can't think, and this way I don't really have to deal with anything.

My meat selection process for the Friday roast goes like so:

1. Is it cheap?
2. ...actually, I only have one criterion.

So I was at the store yesterday and I picked up an assortment of supplements for my kitchen. From my receipt:

Tiny chocolate bars (for the kids' lunches)
10" flour tortillas
1 gallon whole  milk
2 cans orange juice concentrate
1/2 gallon chocolate  milk
1 qt half & half
2 lb brick of cheddar
2 loaves of bread (I do bake bread, but this was on sale)
5 lbs of carrots
3 lbs Braeburn apples
1 lb broccoli
A box of wine 
2 whole chickens

and of course, the star of today's story... 

...a 2.3lb pork shoulder blade roast. This roast cost three dollars and eighty-five cents, which is pretty kickass for meat to feed a family of four plus one itinerant boyfriend. My total grocery bill was about $60 total, which is pretty good for a week. Although of course I forgot butter.

I put the chickens in the freezer, and left the pork roast in the fridge for tonight's dinner. This recipe won't work so well with a leaner pork roast; it really requires the fabulous fatty marbling of the shoulder roast. Pork shoulder is pure roast gold! Often avoided because of its fat content, it's delicious, almost always very inexpensive, and virtually foolproof. Do not fear the shoulder.

To prep the roast, I rustled the following out of the fridge:

1/4 of an onion
7-8 cloves of garlic
6 fairly stunted carrots
2 small potatoes
3 smallish turnips

I chopped all these into 1-1/2" chunks (approximately) and placed them in the bottom of a 3-quart Dutch oven,  then poured about 1/4 cup of wine over them (ha! You were judging my box wine, weren't you?) before sprinkling them with salt and laying the roast on top. I drizzled another couple of tablespoons of wine over the roast, then sprinkled it with salt, pepper, and herbes de provence (you will notice that I use these a LOT. This is my "I'm too tired to think and I need a glass of box wine" go-to seasoning) and put it, uncovered, in a preheated 350 degree oven for an hour and a half. After about an hour, I'll look at it, baste it with the juices in the bottom of the pan, and cover it. After I pull it out, I'll let it sit for half an hour and then pull the meat off the bone with a fork and serve it on plates with the root vegetables, all drizzled with a bit of the delicious meat and veggie juices; easy peasy!