Sunday, April 4, 2010

Late Lunch / Early Supper


Friday's are my day off each week so I like to spend a little more time on meals since I am not pressed for time. With the whole day ahead of me this past Friday I decided to try the Easy Pork Shoulder recipe from the BIG BATCH section of EDF #71 (page 90) since it has to cook for 5 hours. You cook once and get 3 meals, sounds like a plan to me. Meal 1 from the recipe is pulled-pork sandwiches with coleslaw (page 91) with my mom's potato salad as a side.

Easy Pork Shoulder
This recipe is definately easy. You simply score the fat, sprinkle with salt and pepper, put in a pan with 1/2 cup water and then leave it in the oven for 5 hours to slow roast. After the 5 hours the meat was falling apart. I even ended up with enough juices from it that I can make some split pea soup in the future. Then you just remove the fat and shred with 2 forks and divide it up for your future meals.

Next it was on to making the potato salad. I might be biased but I think that this is one of the best potato salads ever.
Mom's Potato Salad
4-5 cups diced cold boiled potatoes
3/4 cup thinly sliced celery
1/4 finely chopped onion
3 hard boiled eggs
1 cup Miracle Whip
1 tbsp vinegar
1 tbsp sugar
salt
pepper

Mix together Miracle Whip, vinegar, sugar, salt and pepper.
Pour over potatoes, celery, onion and eggs.
Gently fold.
Refrigerate until cold.


Here's where things got a little out of hand. The pulled pork sandwhich recipe calls for homemade or store bought bbq sauce. I only use Bulls Eye bbq sauce (Bold Original I think it's called) and I didn't think that it would be good on pork so I decided that if I was going to chance tying a new store bought sauce I may as well make my own. So I pulled out my bbq cook books and found a couple of recipes. To further complicate things I elected to combine them and create my own.


Heathers BBQ Sauce
1 cup beef stock
1 cup crushed tomatoes
1/2 cup fancy molasses
3 tbsp cider vinegar
2 tbsp sugar
2 tbsp Dijon mustard
1/2 small onion very finely diced
2 cloves minced garlic
2 tsp Worcestershire sauce
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp pepper
4 tsp paprika
1 tsp ground chipotle
1 tsp dried oregano

Mix together and simmer until reduced by about one third (approximately 20 minutes).

Last step, the pulled-pork sandwiches. We debated about whether to try the coleslaw on the sandwiches or not and figured that we would go for it. So I quickly chopped up the cabbage and carrots and tossed with the dressing, combined the pork and the bbq sauce and assembled.



Ratings (for the meal as a whole):
Brad - 7 - Would like to have this meal again
Heather - 7 - Didn't love it and am not sure that it was worth all the work I created for myself

As a side note my friend Kandice also made this recipe the day before. Her rating was the same as mine. The one thing that might have made a difference is that we both used smoked pork shoulder when I think we should have tried to find one that wasn't. If I see one in the store I may attempt again to compare.

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