Foodie Friday | Dr. Pepper Slow Cooker Pulled Pork

Boy do I have a good one for you tonight! So good, in fact, that we are making this again tomorrow. I'm talking about slow cooker pulled pork.

I took it upon myself to do a meat dish on last week's Slow Cooker Saturday because I felt bad for Blake. I've been making him eat a whole lot of meatless, healthy, and fish-based dishes lately and he deserved to eat something that he would really enjoy. Oh sure, he said he liked the French onion soup and the vegetarian satay, but let's be honest, my man is a carnivore. He was off taking a long, tedious teaching exam last Saturday, so while he was gone I cooked a pork butt in the Crock-Pot.

There are probably hundreds of pulled pork slow cooker recipes online, and I looked at many of them before deciding that this should be a really simple thing to make. In fact, I think I made it about as simple as humanly possible. I used a total of four (4!) ingredients, including the pork butt itself!

Most of the recipes I found for slow cooker pulled pork called for either some sort of dark soda like Dr. Pepper, Root Beer, or Coca-Cola or a medium to dark beer. As you can see, I used Dr. Pepper. Also, they almost all cut up one whole onion and put it in the pot, so I did that as well.

Now, where most of the recipes differ from my "easy way out" is that they had elaborate seasonings to add to your pork, essentially making your own rub. I highly suggest going the route that I did and buying pork rub from the store. Blake had already discovered a pork rub that we like for when he barbecues ribs or butt, so we just used it. It's called Spade L Ranch Pork Chop & Rib Seasoning and we buy it at Albertson's in Southern California. For us, it is way more economical this way, rather than buying all the different seasonings to go into a homemade rub. This container cost around $3-$4 and easily will last us through 4 or more large cuts of pork or ribs.

We bought a 3 1/2 pound pork shoulder (butt) with the bone in. Because this was my first try at cooking meat, we bought the smallest one at the butcher to make sure it would fit in the Crock-Pot. I'm confident we will be able to buy a bigger one - probably around 5 pounds - and it will fit nicely. There was a lot of room in there. Blake put the rub on the night before for me, because even though I now eat the thing, after 12 years of being a vegetarian, I'm still squeamish about touching the raw meat.

Since there are only four ingredients here, the steps are so beyond simple. Quarter (or eighth) a whole onion, put it in the pot:

Dump in a can (or 12 ounces if you're measuring from a 2 liter bottle like me) of Dr. Pepper:

Place big hunk of raw meat on top:

And then cook away! I did a method of 1 hour on high first, since my pork butt was not room temperate, and then switched it to low for the rest of the cooking. Other recipes said 8-10 hours of cooking time on low, but I basically just kept an eye on it. It ended up being done at about 7 hours total (including the one hour on high). You can tell it's done when the bone slides right out of the thing like butter and it's basically starting to fall apart on its own. 

Here it is at the one hour point when I turned the temperature down to low. Not much of a difference, but the meat was starting to sweat:

Here it is after 3 hours total:

And after about five and a half hours, you can see that the bone is already ready to fall right out of the meat:

At this point, we flipped the whole pork butt over to give the juices a chance to get soaked in on the other side. 

It was already starting to pull apart once we flipped it, but the center seemed like it may have been a little tough still so we figured at least a couple more hours. Blake was home by this point and assisted in the flipping process (two sets of tongs were used). Also, I found it pretty amazing that there ended up being so much liquid in the crock pot. I never would have guessed so much juice could come out of that pork butt, but what do I know!? haha

Right at about 7 hours, we declared it done, although it probably would have been perfectly fine if we stopped cooking it an hour earlier. At this point it was literally falling apart and Blake had filled the kitchen floor with drool.

Once he started picking at the meat and eating it straight out of the pot, I figured we had better take it out and pull it, otherwise there wouldn't be anything left for me to eat. Here's a nice sequence shot of when I took out the bone. Photos by Blake:

Once we took the bone out, the whole thing started crumbling, so we pulled out the pieces and put them into a bowl. We hadn't even started pulling or shredding it yet, and this is what it looked like:

Then it was time to shred, or pull, the pork:

We didn't want to make all of our pulled pork saturated in barbecue sauce because we thought we might want to use some of this meat for tacos on a different day (we didn't, we ate it all in about a day and a half). I did spoon some of the juice from the slow cooker back into the shredded pork mixture, about three or four servings spoons full, just because it seemed a little dry once we pulled it.

Lastly, we heated up some buns, sliced a little onion and topped it with our favorite barbecue sauce. We used onion hamburger buns and medium sized Hawaiian Rolls for sliders. Both tasted delicious. Blake was so happy, nearly in tears over how good it was. So juicy and tender and the flavor was incredible.

Even Mr. Barbecue/Smoker Man admitted that this Crock-Pot pulled pork was every bit as good as his 10-hour smoked pork butt. Although it doesn't have that wonderful smokey flavor when you do it this way, you get a lot more of the taste of the actual pork instead. It's a good trade off.

Anything that gives him that look on his face deserves to be done again, so it's another (bigger) pork butt going into the slow cooker tomorrow. This time I'm planning on using some of it for pulled pork tacos...for real this time!

I'll keep you posted ;)
[ j. ]

Wedding Wednesdays - Part 8 | Starting Our Registry

Last Sunday, Blake and I started something that a lot of brides get engaged for... our wedding registry! haha...

Okay in all seriousness, it was very fun. We went to Bed, Bath and Beyond (or B^3, or B-cubed) and officially started scanning things into our registry. I had semi-started one online, but we needed to get in there, walk the aisles, and go trigger-happy. It was a lot of fun, like I said, but very time-consuming! We never even made it out of the "Beyond" part of the store, and we haven't gone into the Bed or Bath areas yet. In fact, we really were just in the kitchen department for the whole time. It took a few hours just to get through that one area, and apparently we were breezing through it rather quickly compared to some couples. It's already kind of a blur at this point, but I know it took a long time.

I've heard some things from friends and family members who have done this already and what I can clearly see is that we all definitely scan things that we don't really need and will probably never use. I've already gone back into the online account once to remove/change some things that I was gently pressured into scanning by the sales associate who was walking around with us. Which is fine, because I can always swap things out online. I also need my mom to help with editing some of this stuff because, frankly, I don't know which pots and pans I should register for. I know I need new ones, but which ones? I mean, I'm not a gourmet chef over here or anything... Plus, once I go to other stores, I'll probably take things off of the B-3 registry if I like something in another store more. It's a work in progress.

But here's the main point I want to get to with this whole registry thing: As much fun as it was, why is this still the tradition? They gave us a checklist worksheet of all the items that we're "supposed" to register for and it did make me wonder...why? I'm definitely not going to be talked into registering for certain things (especially if I already have a perfectly good microwave) just because I'm "supposed" to register for them.

Does anyone actually use an egg slicer?

No, seriously, this is on the official "must register for" checklist. I mean, c'mon. (BTW- I fully expect to get a dozen of these from people now that I'm talking trash about it here on the blog.. haha) Now, don't get me wrong, there are plenty of home items that we really do need and we are going to be extremely thankful for receiving them. I was really lusting after a couple of them when I was making dinner on Monday night. It's just that registering for all this stuff seems very old-fashioned.

"Give the couple a wedding gift that the 'little woman' will use to make a nice home for her hard-working husband."As much as I may try to cook and clean and keep things organized around here, I definitely don't consider myself a Susie Homemaker.

Plus, I always feel bad for the groom when I look at registries. Whenever I've bought wedding gifts for other people, I always scour their registry to find something that the groom might be wanting, too. While we were scanning things in the store, for every 10 things I wanted, there was maybe, maybe, one thing that Blake was moderately excited about.

So, once we finally make our way out of the "Beyond" and move on to another store, we have decided to definitely register somewhere a little more our style: REI! Tents, sleeping bags, ice chests, skiing equipment and accessories, freeze-dried backpacking food, water bottles...even socks! That's what I'm talking about ;) I'm pretty sure there's plenty of stuff in there to get Blake excited. Maybe it's not necessarily traditional, but it's us.

You may or may not see a pair of Ocean Kayaks on our registry, I'm just sayin'...

Until then, I'll don my best oven mitts and apron and get back to whipping up a nice dinner for my loving, soon-to-be husband's return home from work...

[ j. ]

Foodie Friday | French Onion Soup & Quinoa Superfood Salad

This post is going to be about two new recipes I tried this week, one was a glorious hit, and the other was just fair to medium. I'll start with the Slow-Cooker Sunday recipe from last week which was French Onion Soup. Apparently, I picked the worst week ever to make a hearty, warm-the-belly soup. I have a feeling that this soup would have been better received on a rainy winter night, but last Saturday it was sunny and warm, so it didn't really feel right. It only tasted okay, too. It wasn't mind-blowing. The bread and cheese was really the best part, which was unfortunate.

The worst part was that we didn't eat any of the leftovers. None. I'm going to blame it on the 95 degree, Santa Ana wind weather that we have had all this last week, which for us in Southern California is just excruciating. It's so hot, there's zero percent humidity, 50 mph winds, and wildfires. Not exactly soup weather. So, bad planning on my part. Tomorrow's Slow-Cooker Saturday is going to be pulled pork because that's more summery (even though it looks like the temps are now going to drop to the low 60s - but whatever, I can't plan meals around the weather!). We also might have some people over to watch the first Ducks/Kings playoff hockey game so a bowl of shredded meat sounds like a good idea.

I figured I'd still go ahead and put the recipe for the French onion soup on here, because in the end it is a decent recipe. It probably needs some tweaking, or I might just try a whole different recipe altogether, but for my first try at making any kind of soup from scratch, it did taste okay. I suggest trying this for a winter's day, however. This is not a summer recipe.

The recipe can be found here on sixtyone45.com and is labeled as Beer & Balsamic French Onion Soup. In addition to beer and balsamic vinegar, it includes four different kinds of onions... so what could go wrong, right? Nothing, really. I opted for veggie stock instead of beef just to keep it vegetarian for me. I'm sure some people probably think this is sacrilege but I think it's fine.

So, like I said, beer, balsamic vinegar, four kinds of onions, and then there's garlic, some butter, brown sugar, fresh thyme, flour, and veggie stock. You top it with bread and cheese after it's done, too. Simple ingredients for the most part. Although, I did have to google how to handle fresh thyme. I've never used it before and all the tiny leaves confused me. Do I try to pluck them off one-by-one? Chop up the stems? I didn't know, but I found this very helpful video on YouTube. Once that dilemma was solved, I got to cooking. 

The first step is to basically caramelize the onions and garlic in the crockpot. I could have stopped right at this step and just eaten the big bowl of onions, honestly. But I know not everyone loves onions the way I do. I put them in just about everything and can eat them like apples. But I digress... 

Put all the chopped onion, garlic, butter, brown sugar, and balsamic vinegar into the crockpot, with the temperature set to high:

Let's just pause for a moment and look at this thing of beauty:

Stir it all up:

And let the onions brown for at least an hour, stirring every so often:

 Here are my onions after about an hour and fifteen minutes:

Next you add in the flour, and then stir that up into the onions:

Then add in all the remaining ingredients, including the beer! I used Newcastle Brown Ale. I bought a large single beer (I'm not a big beer drinker so I didn't see the value in buying a six pack) so I measured out 12oz for the soup and then drank the rest of it!

Note that you also turn down the crockpot to low at this point and then cook for 6-8 hours. Here it is with the broth, beer and thyme added in, it's all stirred up and ready to slow cook:

I should point out that already, just from the onions cooking, the house smelled amazing. Nothing like last week's nauseating, overwhelming peanut butter smell from the satay. This was a delicious smell, and one I welcomed! I think cooking onions and garlic might be my favorite food smell.

Here we are after about three hours of cooking away:

Here it is at 5 hours, not a whole heck of a difference in the look to it, really:

And this is it when I declared it done at about 6 1/2 hours, mostly because I was just hungry and ready to eat at this point:

Since I didn't have "oven safe" bowls, or at least I didn't know if I did or not and didn't want to have another measuring cup fiasco (don't ask), I decided to just slice up some cheese and melt it onto toasted slices of crusty bread in the toaster oven and then plop it into my soup. I prefer having loads of cheese melting over the side of the bowl, but hey, sometimes you just gotta make due. I also used fancy, expensive gruyere cheese and next time would definitely just go for some swiss, just to save money. Although the expensive gruyere is amazing.

So, that's pretty much it with this one. We both liked the bites that had bread and cheese, the soup itself without the bread and cheese just tasted a little too bitter on its own. And by the time it was done, neither of us were really in the mood for it! But I'm sure I'll try this again, hopefully on a rainy, cold day next time!

 

As for my second experiment of the week, I made a recipe called "Superfood Salad with Lemon Vinaigrette" that I found on Pinterest. This thing was KILLER and I highly recommend it! The recipe is here on IowaGirlEats.com (I'm just now noticing that there are a load of other good looking recipes on her site, so I might be digging in a little deeper there!). Unfortunately, I didn't take any good photos of this one, but the next time I make it (as early as next week I would imagine) I will take step-by-step photos. I didn't really expect it to be so delicious, to be honest, so I was unprepared. I thought it would just be healthy and edible at best. But I was wrong!

I did snap a cell phone pic of it while I was eating it, though, so you can get the gist.

This recipe introduced me to a whole new ingredient that I've never tried before: quinoa! (For those of you who only know this word from the football tailgating commercial, it's pronounced KEEN-wah) I feel like this is becoming one of those "trendy" health foods like kale and I'm seeing it everywhere now (also like kale). But the good thing is, unlike kale, it's really delicious! Okay, kale isn't that bad, really. I like it in juice. Quinoa is really wonderful, though and I'm sure I'll be making it all the time now. I greatly prefer it to brown rice, and there are so many interesting recipes out there, including using it as a breakfast cereal!

Now, this recipe is super easy, it's just a matter of mixing things together. I'll give you a few of the shortcuts that I used. First of all, I bought pre-made frozen quinoa from Trader Joe's. I will definitely make it from scratch in the future, but for now this is the easiest for me. I went that route because I had never had it before and if I screwed it up, I'd have no idea. I would just think it's supposed to taste like burnt popcorn or whatnot. So, this way it was fool-proof.

I also bought pomegranate seeds at Trader Joe's, sans tough outer container. These were already plucked from the delicate innards of the pomegranate fruit and put into a simple plastic container for me, ready to dump into the salad. Easy-peasy! Bad for the environment with all that packaging, but who really wants to spend an hour digging seeds out of the pomegranate?? Don't skip the seeds, either. They were arguably the best part of the dish.

What I would probably leave out next time was the orange. It was just a little too much fruit in there for my taste. The pomegranate seeds were enough. The mix of the garlicky-lemon vinaigrette just didn't really go well with the oranges in my opinion, and I found myself avoiding them as I was eating. But if you love oranges, by all means, throw them in there. I can see myself adding in different veggies to this dish, too. I'm not sure what just yet, but I'd imagine you could toss in whatever vegetables you happen to have in your fridge at the moment and it would work out just fine!

The other thing I would absolutely do differently is put the avocado on top as a garnish, rather than mix it in. Not only does it turn the whole consistency of the dish into a paste, but it gets that brownish tint to it and just doesn't look pretty. Besides, I like biting into a chunk of avocado, not just mashing it up into my quinoa. The shrimp were a great touch, too, and I would add in more of those next time, probably grilling them on the BBQ after marinating them in the lemon vinaigrette for a while.

That the wrap up of this week's new dishes. Like I said, tomorrow's Slow Cooker Saturday is pulled pork so it's already in my fridge prepped with rub:

So nasty! Haha, I'm still not used to the idea of eating meat just yet. And I don't know if I'll ever get used to seeing a raw hunk of animal in my fridge. But, my man can't survive on healthy, vegetarian meals alone. Every now and then I'm going to have to just bite the bullet and cook him some MEAT! Wish me luck!

[ j. ]