Thursday, July 10, 2008

Slow Cooker Pork Shoulder

I am not a red meat kind of girl. I'll eat it when it's the star of a menu, but give me a salad topped with a delicately balanced poached egg, a veggie pizza dripping with mozzerella, or better yet, a chocolate croissant, and I'll call it a good meal. Consequently, I'm hopeless at the meat counter. I ask with some uncertainty for a boneless pork shoulder, around two and a half pounds, pretty please. I expect to be sniffed out as a non meat-worshiper and dismissed with a shout of,
"Get out of here, veggie lover! We don't serve your kind!"
Instead, the butcher tells me he'll bring it out and disappears into the Back Room. I hear saws whirring. I am handed a glorious, glistening hunk of pork the size of my head. I place it in the passenger seat of my car and drive it home to meet its destiny.


"Trim excess fat from pork shoulder."
Right. After a ten-minute wrestling match with the pork, it has surrendered a wad of fat about the size of my fist. The remaining fat is tucked away in impossible folds of pig meat. I give up.

The pork is in the slow cooker now, peppered and salted, sweating in a
little sauna of onion and chicken broth. In approximately four hours, it'll be
ready for a wheat bun, a little mayonnaise, and a lot of love.

3 comments:

valereee said...

Allison, next time ask your butcher to trim any fat, too! He'll be happy to. If he's not, find a new butcher. :D

Colin said...

I have pretty much the same reaction whenever I buy meat (thankfully I'm better with seafood), so you're not alone. The real problem is that I'm horrible at cooking it, too, thankt to a decade of vegetarianism, unless it's in curry form...

Kellie said...

Allison you're a witty writer!
-Kellie (from 12 Pine).