Thursday nights are quickly becoming our crock-pot nights. Darrell works until eight so it is my night to cook, and many weeks I end up working until seven or eight myself, so I usually just put something in the crock-pot before I leave in the morning. Yesterday's meal was even more last minute than usual, as I had been planning on making a Thai pasta dish, but then found out that I needed to work until eight. So Wednesday night I dug through our pantry and freezer looking for an easy alternative. Luckily, we had just bought some hamburger buns for burgers last week, and since I've been craving BBQ pork sandwiches for weeks I was sold. And they couldn't have been easier to prepare.
Enter glorious crock-pot:
That's some good ol' pork cooking away. All I did was put a little BBQ dry rub on it (we make our own), covered it in rootbeer (I think we'll use actual beer next time), and let it cook on low for eight hours. It was so tender that it started to fall apart as I tried to pull it out, which made shredding it really easy (just pull at it with two forks and you're golden). We lathered them up in some home-made BBQ sauce and we were good to go!
(For the record, they turned out delicious.)
I was also excited because I got to try out a feature of our oven that we haven't used in the 14 months that we've owned it. Our oven has a delayed start feature on it, so I slipped some acorn squash in the oven, set it to turn on at 7:40, and walked away. I’ll admit that I was a little nervous—it seemed like there were so many things that could go wrong—but in reality the only problem we had was not starting it soon enough (I forgot to take into consideration the time that the oven needed to pre-heat when I set the start time). Here is the squash waiting patiently for the oven to turn on and cook it.
The squash is super easy as well--in fact, it’s a new favorite of ours--just cut it in half, scoop out all the seeds (like you would a cantaloupe, but they have more the texture of a pumpkin), place it on a cookie sheet (clean-up is way easier if you line it with foil), and bake at 400 degrees for 30-ish minutes. You want the insides to be nice and soft and easy to scoop out; an easy check to see if it’s are done is to squeeze the sides.
All in all a pretty solid meal considering neither of us walked in the door until after 8:15 and we were eating at the table by 8:30!
Pork+beer is one of the best combinations ever. Seriously. I marinate and cook pork chops in beer all the time. Also, who doesn't put their brats in a beer and onion hot tub before grilling? Beer and pork is like peanut butter and jelly.
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