Not the Most Traditional 4th of July Dinner, but...

The weather in Syracuse on the 4th was something less than perfect. It struggled to get to 70 degrees and was cloudy and raining pretty much all day. Somehow it felt more like a perfect late September afternoon for college football than a day for fireworks and barbecues.

I spent part of the morning looking at cookbooks for something that inspired and I decided to go with something from one of my most interesting books. It's called Murakami Recipe and is a Japanese cookbook that contains recipes based on the food prepared in Haruki Murakami's novels and short stories. If you've never read any of his books, I recommend them highly (especially The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, A Wild Sheep Chase, and Dance, Dance, Dance) and food and jazz are often woven into the narratives. In A Wild Sheep Chase our main character is stuck in a house in Hokkaido with nothing to do but cook and prepares a roast beef. I decided to make a dinner based on that recipe.

We had a boneless roast in the freezer, so I thawed it and prepared a paste of roasted garlic. I got some rosemary and lemon thyme from our herb garden and chopped those up and mixed them with sea salt and black pepper. I rubbed the garlic paste over the top of the roast and coated as much of the outside as I could with the herb mixture. Uncovered areas I seasoned with salt and pepper. The beef went into a 375 degree oven for 40-45 minutes (until the internal temperature of the roast hit 125 degrees). In the meantine I chopped up some zucchini and yellow squash and roasted it with sage, salt and pepper, and prepared some mashed potatoes with cheddar cheese.

The roast came out of the oven and we popped the cork on a nice, if reasonably priced, bottle of Carmenere, a Chilean red. The meat was tender with a nice garlic and herb crust on the top side. An easy recipe with satisfying results.