Eye of Round Roast

Cooking has been my main creative outlet lately.  I decided to take this month's theme and do a cooking experiment trying both a dish and a technique I had never used before.  An eye of round roast is a fairly lean cut of beef.  It doesn't have the fat or the connective tissue that left make a typical beef roast so tender and juicy.  I found a recipe that called for roasting the beef at a very high temperature for a short time - about 500 degrees, for just 7 minutes per pound (no searing, browning, or anything else - and then just letting it sit in the hot oven for about 2.5 hours (don't open the oven door!).  I had serious reservations.  "My oven will be ice cold at the end of 2.5 hours," I thought.  "How could the roast possibly come out done?! This could be an unmitigated disaster."  I tried it anyway.  I made it for Sunday dinner, and we invited some friends over...why not?

This is what the roast looked like before going into the oven:



 This is what it looked like in the oven:

This is what it looked like "done:"













You might not be able to tell exactly how pink that roast is inside.  The color is actually not much different from the cutting board it's sitting on.  It turns out my fears about the oven being totally cold at the end of 2.5 hours were well-founded.  The roast came out very solidly rare, and barely warmer than room temperature.  When we put it on the serving platter, it was soon swimming in a pool of blood, like some kind of deli murder scene.  I was...completely...mortified, but I had to serve it since we had nothing else to eat, and despite its macabre appearance, I didn't actually think it was unsafe.  Our guests were very gracious and their kids even seemed to like the "red chicken."  Bottom line - this recipe is not welcome in our kitchen anymore; it was simply too offensive on its first and only visit.  And next time, I will try to spare our guests my culinary experiments.