Recipe from Grandma Dorothy
POT ROAST Rule of Thumb:
The pot roasts we have included in our cookbook vary on cooking time and temperatures. It all depends on the amount of liquid (onions are an added source), the pot they are in, and your oven. Many old recipes had temperatures as high as 450º. This could be due to types of ovens, or a variety of things. Our Rule of Thumb is to check for liquid and doneness, once you pass the 1 hour time mark. You don't want it to dry out, BUT you DO want it to be fork tender and to fall of the bone, so to speak. "Keep an eye on your Thyme!"

Portuguese festas, there is such a thing as a free lunch!
A Little Trivia:
You liked what you ate, so you ask for the recipe. "First," you might be told,"trim 9,000 pounds of beef."
Is this a joke? Not at all, but not to worry, you won't be using this amount 😊. It's the customary starting point for the volunteer cooks who prepare the sopas, the traditional dinners that are the mainstay of the nearly 100 Portuguese festivals held from late spring to early autumn throughout California, many of them in the South Bay.

A distant cousin to New England boiled dinners, sopas are one-pot meals of beef and vegetables in a hearty broth. Most food and all the labor at a festa is donated, so there is no admission ticket or dinner tab - just voluntary donations, and everyone is welcome.

Still, the sopas and festa food provide a taste of home to Northern California's Portuguese descendants, most of whom have their roots not in the Portuguese mainland, but rather in the Azores, where our ancestors are from, a string of nine islands nearly 1,000 miles west of the southwestern tip of the Iberian peninsula, a third of the way to the New World. Some romantics believe that the Azores are the last remnant of the lost continent of Atlantis.