Roast Beast with Mashed Potatoes, Steamed Carrots and Two-Dollar Tomatoes

Yum. We've been doing a lot of family dinners lately - every Sunday, as part of the Empty-the-Freezer quest - and it's been quite nice having a big proper dinner together. (We're running low on roasts, finally, as we've now only got two left, one pork roast and another beef roast.)

This was a pretty simple roast. The recipe book called it 5 Minute Roast, by which they mean the prep part takes less than five minutes. My sister did most of that, but I'd guess that was about all the time we put into it before putting it into the oven. It maybe came out a touch dry - the thermometer wasn't registering properly. (It was reading 85 degrees, but you can see plainly that it's well done, and so should have read nearer to 160.) But it tasted very good and with a little of the juices spooned over top, it didn't seem dry at all.

That's some more of my delicious tomato. I was going to eat it with some mozzarella slices, but the cheese smelled like it had gone off, so I chucked it. Alas. Anyway, that tomato is so good that it was maybe nearly a crime to have doctored it with salt and pepper.

Question, though: what turns mashed potatoes into a gluey paste? The last two times my brother-in-law has made them, they've come out with the most bizarre texture.