Urp.

Good god. It's day one of the new year, I had all kinds of wild ideas about profound and enlightening blog posts for a month, and all I've got right now is and overly full tummy and breath that could knock over a buffalo.

This evening's meal was a delayed New Year's dinner. After baking that foolish cheesecake yesterday, I had no ambition to address a sirloin roast. Frig that. I thawed some steak tips that Quinn did NOT get into and we had stir-fry. Nice and easy. Perfect.

But the roast was still in the fridge, and since it had been in the freezer once already, I couldn't really put it back, so I had to do something with it.

Remember last week when we stopped to pick up groceries that we could not find here? I got some pancetta and some prosciutto, plus the sirloin roast and the now-famous steak tips. Well, I also got this great little deli tub of peeled whole garlic cloves. Gawd I love those things. When I peel garlic, I generally smash it up first to get the skin off that way. They don't slice pretty afterwards, as a rule, and tonight I wanted pretty slices.

So I sliced and slivered up maybe a dozen or more cloves of garlic and laid out probably two dozen slices of the prosciutto in a large mat. I sprinkled the garlic on the mat, dusted it well with coarse ground black pepper, and wrapped that bad boy around the boneless sirloin roast (about three pounds). I tied it up with string jut like a brown paper package ("when the dog bites... when the bee stings...") and tucked 'er into the oven at 325 for about 80 minutes.

Once the spilled bits of cheesecake ash-ified themselves on the oven floor (oops), it stopped smoking and eventually the whole house smelled vaguely of bacon, beef, and garlic. I stuck a thermometer in it after a while, figured that rare to medium-rare was about right, and took it out. We boiled some potatoes and mashed them with butter and milk, threw some frozen string beans in some water and brought 'em to a boil and called in New Year's Dinner. It was simple, moderately decadent, and extremely filling. The prosciutto crisped up very nicely and the garlic slivers cooked up to that marvelous sweet, squishy stage just before they get bitter, and the pepper got the two talking to each other in very friendly terms. Oh it was grand.

Sorry, but the picture is lousy tonight. Camera was misbehaving and everything looks fuzzy. Could just be the excited jitters from the aroma.

Bon Appetit