Tangy Slow Cooker Pork Roast

Yesterday morning while Sam was at school I popped a roast in the crock pot and didn't have to think about what to make for dinner all day long. Those are my favorite sorts of days. The recipe is here, and the only major thing I changed is that I skip the hot sauce and double the amount of garlic powder. As I mentioned Thursday, this isn't exactly a healthy recipe. The marinade that the pork cooks in is full of ingredients that those on a strict diet might want to avoid: sugar, soy sauce, ketchup, salt, etc. Not sure how modifying it might work out...you'd probably still want some sort of tomato-based acid to break down the meat and a vinegar to add flavor. Plus, depending on the cut of meat, it can be loaded with saturated fat. In the past, I've tried making this recipe with a loin roast, trimming away the bulk of the fat from the top. This time, it was a bone-in shoulder roast, just because that was what was on sale (and I'd used up all the pork roasts we got when we bought on the hoof with my parents.) Anyhow. I heated up the water in the microwave for about a minute to get it nice and warm, but not boiling. I added it to just the sugar first and whisked until it was totally dissolved, added the other ingredients, and whisked again. Since the ketchup comes out of the fridge cold it can sometimes be difficult to blend in with the liquid ingredients, so the whisking helps.

So here's the roast in the crock pot on top of the sliced onion (second recipe in a row with a farmer's market ingredient, WOOT.)

And then the sauce/marinade/whatever you want to call it:

And pour it over, and we're good!

I set the crock pot on low for 8 hours. When it was finally done, it looked like this:

It falls right off the bone, so if you were serving it as a roast, you'd need to be very careful getting it out of the crock pot. Rather than serving it with noodles, I decided to make sandwiches with some buns we had on hand already, barbecue sauce optional. Dan had the brilliant idea to add shredded cheese, which was also delicious. Of course I totally forgot to take a picture of the actual sandwiches, but here's a picture of some of the meat and onions I pulled from the crock pot.

Altogether the meal cost $8.21 for the roast and the onion, the rest I had on hand already (maybe amounted to another $2-3, depending on what kind of sale price I got on the buns and frozen veggies), and we had plenty of leftover meat to make another couple sandwiches this weekend. It's a pretty rich recipe so I try not to make it all that often.

Tonight Dan is going to grill hamburgers from his own recipe, so I may blog about what I make during the weekend for Monday's post.