Gluten Free Eye Round Roast and Tangy Homemade Steak Sauce

Natural Gluten Free Eye Round Roast

Food can be a very tricky facet of our lives. Beside the actual buying and painstaking preparation of your jars and bushels and packages and bags of sustenance we have a whole host of social and familial implications to contend with. Maybe you're lucky and you don't haul emotional food issues around along with your spare tire. Maybe your family was ultra pragmatic (and completely outside the realm of the "normal" American family, read: dysfunctional) and never ascribed hives of emotional longing and investment into your Grandmother's spaghetti sauce, zucchini bread or borscht. Maybe your aunt never praised you to the rafters for cleaning your plate (even though you were stuffed to your earlobes and about to explode into a geyser of mashed potatoes). Maybe you've never told yourself "That's IT, food is evil, I'm only chewing on ice cubes for the next 5 days." If you are someone who has escaped the inner hell of food obsession and fully grasped the meaning of "I'm eating to live, not living to eat", I applaud you. If you're one of the rest of us, still hunkering through the battle of emotional eating, I offer you Gluten Free Eye Round Roast for meals without a second thought.



Fighting Food Issues with food? Hey...that kind of sounds like that saying about fire or something or other... But in fact, what else would we do? Fact: You have to eat. Fact: Cooking something delicious that will feed you simply, quickly and without mountains of thought will help ease your week, your mind and your schedule. When you don't have to fixate on food you can allow it to slip between the events of your day without lurking on the horizon, ripe with intimidation, in the shape of your bubble-haired mother-in-law carrying her famous quiche.

Truth? When I'm working at home, writing up some copy for a new website or designing marketing materials - I often forget to eat. Literally. I sometimes have to set an alarm. To remember to eat. Pathetic? Yes. But when I'm all tied up in something, whether it be spinning out designs for a paycheck or up to my nose in paint I'm all about having the freedom to open the fridge, pull out something that's going to hit the spot and swirl together a meal before my screensaver pops up. Enter: Eye Round Roast.

Now, I've waxed on about Top Round and Bottom Round Roast - and they're all good. But seriously! The Eye Round takes the cake. Well, the savory biscuit at least. Super smooth, lean, flavorful and not at all stringy like the Top or Bottom roast can be, I call this hunk of meat a winner. We used a lovely natural cut from Whole Foods and feasted for the better part of the week. Naturally gluten free and about $5.99 a pound, how can you argue?

Sliced, Stir Fried, Sandwiched or Diced, you can't go wrong.

Gluten Free Eye Round Roast


2-2 ½ lb. Natural or Organic Eye Round Roast
Olive Oil
Red Wine
Spices (salt, pepper, garlic salt, white pepper, your favorite spice medley - we used the 21 Seasoning Salute from Trader Joe's)

Preheat oven to 325 degrees

Rub roast with olive oil and shake spices on as desired. I would use the word "encrust" here but you probably know how I feel about that.

Place in roasting pan and pour in about 1/8 of an inch of red wine. Pour yourself a glass while you're at it.

Place in your oven on the center rack and cook 40 minutes per pound. A 2 lb. roast would cook for about an hour and 20 minutes.

When the time is up, remove roast from oven, allow it to sit for 5 minutes and carve.


Tangy Homemade Steak Sauce

In a pyrex cup or something prettier if you're fancy, combine:

2 parts organic ketchup 
1 part San J Gluten Free Soy Sauce  
1 part olive oil
1 splash white balsamic vinegar
2 tbsp. brown sugar
a shake of salt, pepper, garlic salt


whisk together and pour on top roast slices, sandwiches or use in stir fry sauces


Bites of Note: A 2 pound roast fed Alex and I both 4 meals. Enjoy roast simply sliced, in a sandwich with steak sauce, as a Philly cheese steak,  in a stir fry, diced with onions and vegetables for a quick rice lunch, on top of salad, in tacos or sliced up inside empanadas.