What is Mobic or? Tylenol is fine for me, but anything that affects kidneys is an issue. This year, I was planning on some salad greens, but because the harvests require me to go down on my knees too much, I decided against it, in favor of broccoli and cukes, stringbeans, and a grape tomato type I loved last year. The tomatoes were the best and sweetest tasting of any I have ever tasted and were 1000% better tasting compared to the cherry types right next to them. I saved seeds from the grape tomatoes and had a 100% germination from the seeds. The plants are now more than a foot tall, just waiting to get outside. Since before the hospital stay, I had small sore spot on my upper left thigh. Last night, I rubbed across it and felt something very hard. Looked at it in the mirror and saw a black spot there. Grabbed a tissue and pulled it off, and it moved! It was a tick, that had been on me for a few weeks and was really hanging onto my skin and hurting. It left a 1/2 diameter red welt there, thats sore too. I rubbed the area with alcohol and put on Bacitracin. I was also wondering about Lyme disease! Now I have to figure out what to use in the garden that can repel or kill ticks.

A almost always cook a pot roast on the stove top. There have been a few occasions when I did it in the oven for one reason or another....but 99% of the time I do it in a Le Cruset oven on the stove top. I learned that 300 or 325 is way too hot in the oven. If I need to put it in the oven, I try to keep the temperature just at the boiling point...and that is 212....about half way between 200 and 225. If cooking on the stove top...know your stove....this cook top needs to be on the lowest simmer setting AND have a flame tamer beneath the pot too...my son's new stove will keep a pot at a perfect simmer without any tamers or diffusers. I much prefer cooking a potroast on the stove top...that's the traditional way and I like it best. And frankly my Le Cruset Dutch Oven stays cleaner....doesn't get those burned on spatters on the sides. I very rarely cover the meat with the liquid...but on the occasion when I knew I would have a lot of grand kids eating mashed potatoes and gravy I have. I don't find there is a problem with texture...no more than with the texture of the beef in a stew. As for the liquid being insipid...not really!...since the liquid consists of wine, beef broth, caramelized onions and garlic and other stuff. If you are using water to cover the meat, it very well mey be insipid and watery...but wine, broth, some onions, garlic a bit of bay leaf and perhaps some dried porcini make all the difference. And as a "cheat" if your gravy lacks something...add some beef stock base....and don't tell! I do it pretty much the same way Bumblebeez does, but I don't add the flour with the onions...."They say" that cooking a thickened gravy a long time causes it to be less thick....easy enough to correct...but worth remembering. Linda C

The thing about words like "gravy", "sauce", "salsa" and "mole" is that they take on local characters to mean something rather specific when all of those words really just mean liquidy stuff to pour over food. Calling it "au jus" is more about the 100+ years of the sandwich famously being described as "au jus", than about it accurately being sauce au jus de viande. One of the restaurants which claims to have created it, Phillippe's (a few blocks from the other one), gave this recipe to Food Network, though I don't know if that's how they actually make theirs. Au jus, is a noun in American English. You will often hear people ask for "more au jus", or ask to "warm up the au jus". One of the origin stories was that the roll fell into the pan drippings at the carving station while a man was getting a beef sandwich and he said he was fine with the wet roll. Another version was that he complained that the bread was stale or too hard, so they dunked it in the juices to soften it. Still another version was that the guy just wanted the drippings so asked to have them soak up on his bread. They say it got the name because customers who saw it would ask to have the roll dipped "like Frenchy does," referring to Mr. Phillippe, who, being French, probably also inaugurated calling it "au jus". Thus, he probably just meant "with the juice", period. At the other place that claims to have invented it, Cole's, they say it was dipped in the juices for a guy with bad teeth who couldn't bite and chew the roll. I could believe that they did make sandwiches with drippings, too, but it makes the most sense that the name of the sandwich, and the "au jus" to dip it in, came from Frenchy's, which is what customers used to call Phillippe's. Whichever, that first French dip sandwich was literally dipped in the jus de viande. I wouldn't think many had been since, since, as you say, there isn't that much juice to be had, especially if you skim it.

Ann T... A Canadian question?? My Grandmother (NOT Canadian at all) made something similar to a pot roast... sorta... that she called Canadian Stew. She'd brown up a hunka beef, then add WHOLE carrots and stalks of celery (or at lest only cut in 2), lots of whole onions, a can of some kinda tomato product and her "required" bay leaf. Then she'd cover everything in that big pot with water and just let it simmer away for a few hours. SHe'd add potatoes for the last 20 minutes or so... otherwise they'd have turned to total mush. She ALWAYS made homemade bread to go with it. Everythiing was scooped out of the broth... which was delicious. You had the falling apart meat and cooked to DEATH (but yummy) veggies on a plate. A bowl or mug of broth, on the side, for dipping the bread. Did she just make up the name??