Bless Her Heart

I promised myself that this blog would not be another cooking blog. There are enough cooking blogs and recipe sources out there already.

But when you have two daughters both with growing families and busy jobs and so on and so on and so forth, you want to make sure that your sons-in-law and grandkids are well-fed.

But when you’re from Mississippi, your whole life revolves around food…always has, always will.

But when you love to cook, you can’t help but talk about it.

But when you’ve decided to share 31 dinner menu ideas – one for each day in the average month – one post every three days…that means that your posts for the next 93 days will automatically food-related.

But when you’ve told your kids that you’re gonna put together a family cookbook by Christmas, digging through old recipes suddenly takes on a new priority.

But when you’re taking classes in food photography, you wanna really play with your food…(don’t worry, updating my pictures soon)…

Eventually I do want to move on to other, and perhaps more interesting, topics…such as antiquing, minimalizing and celebrating holidays like the perfect Southern belle that I know dwells in each of us…

But for now, here’s recipe #16…halfway through…

And this recipe is for fall-apart tender, juicy Barbecue Pulled Pork with a tangy sweet sauce that my family and friends absolutely love.

Barbecue Pulled Pork is great for several reasons:

• Only takes a few minutes to prepare
• Easy to make in crockpot
• Comes out perfectly every time you make it
• Only requires five ingredients

The Ingredients

The Meat: The best meat for making pulled pork is a pork shoulder roast. This cut of meat could also be called a pork butt or Boston butt.

Pork shoulder roasts are relatively inexpensive easy to work with,

Pork shoulder roasts have a lot of marbling, meaning that the meat will be more tender.

You’ll need about 4oz of pork per person. So a 4-pound pork roast should serve about eight people. 

If you are cooking a very large piece of pork and need it to cook more quickly, you can cut it into smaller chunks.

• 4# boneless pork shoulder roast
• 1C barbecue sauce
• ¼C apple cider vinegar
• ¼C chicken broth
• ¼C brown sugar
• 1½tsp Italian seasoning
• 1tsp garlic powder
• 1tsp chili powder
• salt
• pepper
• 1 onion, chopped
• *****
• 1 tablespoon prepared yellow mustard.
• 2 large cloves garlic, crushed.
• 8 hamburger buns, split.
• 2 tablespoons butter, or as needed
• ½ cup water.

Stir BBQ sauce, apple cider vinegar, chicken broth, brown sugar, Italian seasoning, garlic powder, chili powder, salt, pepper and onion together in a slow cooker.

Place roast into the mixture.

Cook the pork butt for eight hours on low (or high for six hour), until the internal temp of the meat reaches at least 200F.

Remove the pork to a board.

Let cool for at least 20 minutes but ideally one hour.This allows the interior juices to redistribute evenly throughout the meat, giving you a moister end result.

(Okay, honestly, how many of us will read this and simply skip this step…until that one day they actually do wait and then discover just how much juicier the meat actually is)…

Add ½C of these collected juices back to the crockpot. Discard the rest.

Shred meat with two forks or meat claws.

Return the shredded meat to the slow cooker. Stir.Cook on low for one more hour.

To store: Store in an airtight container in the fridge for up to one week or in the freezer for up to three months.

To reheat: Reheating in a skillet makes this tastes so much better than if you simply reheated it in the microwave, Add a small amount of olive oil into a skillet. Cook until warmed through. If frozen, first thaw overnight in the fridge.