Liz McGuiness is renowned for her skills as a roving reporter, and chased in the streets for her witty reviews, but there’s other facets to this woman that be fer sure. She likes, nay, loves a roast and has provided her comprehensive guide on how to make it a roast worth turning up for…

I think I should warn you that this blog piece may turn a little violent, but if you are into Game of Thrones or Spartacus, then you’ll find it pleasantly titillating. It’s all about me actually, and my favourite thing to eat in the world. The roast. Now I’m not going to give you a step by step guide to cooking the perfect roast – that’s all over this blog if you want it. I’m going to give you the skills to detect a “fake” good roast and a “oh my effing god I’ve just had 40 orgasms at once” good roast. I’m also going to let you in on a few little secrets on how to get the most out of said roast.

I was brought up in a time when men where men, skinny jeans were not invented yet and women baked a damn fine cake. I was brought up in a place where he who had the biggest cattle shed won, and all others were pretenders. Where a child’s worth was measured by how many head of cattle they could handle on their own for a 1000km drive, and where dogs were shot if they were stupid. Ah….good times, good times. But I can tell you one thing that wasn’t around when I was knee high to a grasshopper (as opposed to now where I am knee high to a ridiculously tall cricket), was small meals. If you went to a restaurant – or let’s face it, in SW Qld in the early 70’s a restaurant was a truck-stop that had more than potato scallops and chiko rolls – and you ordered a steak, you could expect that half a cow would come out on a serving platter, kept company by a Mt Everest of powdered mashed potato, pumpkin and peas, corn and carrot mix. All spread over by a luxurious smothering of gravox. Mmm mmm. That’s some good eatin’. Or not – depends on how hungry you were. You could expect to use your eating utensils to the maximum as you tried to chew your way through the leather that was cleverly disguised as steak. Probably fell off the back of a truck and was beaten to death by Indonesian meat workers to make sure it was dead first. Too far? Too bad. Yay for freedom of speech. Anyway, my point for this blog piece is that a good roast should be lovingly prepared and not eaten – but navigated and explored. When sitting down to a sublime roast, you should expect a whoop-assly large serving of everything and to be given a map and compass as you explore the plate and all it’s terrain.

I cooked a pretty good roast tonight actually, and I can tell you that everyone at the table was given a map and compass. The meat should not be of the “roadkill” variety, apart from the icky invertebrates on this kind of meat, it sucks dead man’s balls when it comes to taste and flavour.

When you have picked your piece of meat from your local butcher, and cooked it in one of the many ways on this blog, you need to rest it for longer than 2 minutes before carving it. I’m telling you, the longer you rest it, the more of a chance there will be that you will get lucky, because everyone knows, if the meat is tender, the loving is rough. Wait. Is that right???

So after carving your meat, it should be carefully fanned out on one side of the plate to maximise the area that will be exposed to gravy loveliness. The vegetables should be creatively piled around the remaining half. But not willy-nilly, oh no. Baked vegetables have a pecking order. Potato is obviously at the top. The perfect roasted potato should be golden brown on the outside and fluffy white on the inside. It should look like it is robust until you cut into it, when its integrity fails a little to welcome the gravy like a horny teenager. Pumpkin should be baked so that it is caramelised, not sloppy. It should say “ hey good looking, my name is Bob and I’ll be your pumpkin tonight” and you should say breathlessly “yes”. Carrot and onion are like pumpkin but obviously not as high up the pecking order.

A good plate of roast anything should not, repeat NOT EVER have the dreaded 3 vege frozen mix of peas, corn and carrot, or any of its peers. If you are going to have corn, make sure it’s a nice, juicy, plump cob, not something dragged out of the freezer that’s been forgotten about since the resurrection of Christ. Your greens should be free from freezer burn, and like the corn, be picked from the fairy garden at the bottom of your path, or if you don’t believe in fairies, freshly purchased from your local growers market which may well be populated by a few fairies anyway.

Now to the gravy. The sauce of any dish is the glue that binds the dish together. But this is just an analogy – you don’t really want it tasting like glue. If it does, chances are you have fucked it up and need to start again. At no stage, should your glue go anywhere near the plate of roast. I’m not going to tell you how to make gravy or jus, because there’s shitloads of that on this blog somewhere as well. But am I going to tell you that if you want to use gravox, because you are the timid sort where sauces are concerned, that is ok. Provided you use the meat juices and some plonk.

So you’ve made a roast in a roasting pan, you say. So you don’t really want to use plonk and flour to make an outrageously good jus, you say. That’s fine. Perhaps you’d like to take some course sandpaper to your tastebuds because you obviously don’t need them. Anyway, if all you have is gravox, a saucepan and a damn fine roasted piece of meat, dress that gravy up by resting the meat and after you have carved it, and made the gravy, pour the meat juices into the gravy and stir.  If you make glue, you will die alone. If you have gravy with meat juices in it, you will pull tonight. If you make a magnificent jus with meat juices and plonk, you will live the rest of your life in a disease free whore house where your every whim will be catered for. Do you see where I’m going? Good.

So the gravy/jus should be the last thing that is layered onto the plate. And it should be hot. Not lukewarm, not cold, not frigid like a little bitch, hot. And if you are receiving the plate, you should be able to tell that the gravy was placed over the roast in a loving and reverent manner – hopefully accompanied by some midget monks giving it their blessings. You should be able to smell the different components of the roast on the plate. You should be looking for your map and compass because you don’t know where to start, it all looks so fucking fabulous.

If you receive a plate of roast where any of this hasn’t happened, you need to walk out. Unless it’s at your mother-in-law’s house and your father-in-law likes to shoot big guns. That would be the only circumstance where it would be fine to eat a crappy roast.