These days, I'm cooking more at home and eating out less often. I have always liked to cook, but stuck pretty close to the things I knew I could do well. With fewer trips out, though, I have to find new ways to get some variety.
Further complicating things is the fact that I shop pretty exclusively off the weekly ad now (you can see how I keep the grocery bill for myself and my husband around $30 dollars a week here). I can't always stick with my comfort zone of cooking because it's not as affordable!
This has actually been great for me though. I'm learning new things. Failure's always possible, and that's fine. Just keep the pizza place's phone number close, friends.
Here we go on a new cooking experiment, based off what was available in the weekly ad. Pork butt country style ribs.
Yep. Pork butt. It's a new cut of meat for me.
I had to look it up to learn what it was. Pork butt country style ribs are not actually ribs. They are, however, barbecuable...I think? I'm making them with barbecue sauce in the crock pot. In theory, this will not be that hard. We're about to find out.
Finding a recipe:
I looked up a few recipes, but the first few I selected I kept realizing either involved actual pork ribs, or ingredients I did not have. After several attempts at selecting a correct recipe, I finally landed on this one: Crock Pot Barbecued Country Style Ribs. These are not ribs, so unless the recipe notes that these will work with a recipe for actual ribs, don't use it.As aside note, I now have an almost full container of apple juice. Any ideas? Send them along if you have any.
By the way, the crock pot is a great style to start with for cooking new meats. Why? Because it seems to me that its very hard to mess up cooking meat in a pot filled with apple juice (in this case...often it's broth) that times itself.
Preparation: 15 minutes
The actual preparing of this dish was a short process, and simple. The hardest work involved was chopping an onion. The recipe called for trimming the excess fat off the meat, which I don't actually know how to do. I assumed it meant taking off any extra fatty portions, which I did, and everything seemed to turn out okay. I could have asked the Internet, but it seemed self explanatory. If I'm wrong, correct me.
After doing both of these steps and dumping everything in, the crock pot is ready to do its magic. I turned it on and left it for 8 hours.
At the 8 hour mark you are supposed to drain the liquids from the pork...umm...ha...I forgot to do that. Oops. I realized this after I put the sauce into the crock pot. I tried to spoon off some of the liquid and decided it just wasn't worth it. I let it cook in the juice the final hour, and it seems that no harm was done. My pork, then, is in a different sort of sauce that is actually called for. You may want to drain the liquid yourself...the recipe did not suffer terribly for it still being there, though, if you are like me and overly confident of your memory.
That's all! If you do what I did and forget to drain the liquid, you can take off the excess fat once the dish cools (I had to leave it in the fridge over night because the meat finished cooking so late, and then the next evening I just spooned the grease off the top. That could be gross, I guess, but it was effective for solving my error!)
 |
| Food...Not easy to photograph. This is actually what I made, though, plus some edits to make it look slightly better. |
Difficulty Level: Easy
I made a rather serious error and this was still edible at the end. There also were only eight ingredients, two of which were salt and pepper and therefore don't count.
Price:
Remember, I shop with the weekly ad and keep ingredients on hand. Here, however, is my price breakdown.
Meat, about 3 lbs... $5.63...I also pulled it out of the freezer. I got it on a trip to the store a few weeks ago when there were several good sales on meat.
Apple Juice, store brand...$1.49; you can also use apple cider, which you may have on hand in the fall. (we have a lot left)
Onion... $0.44
Barbecue sauce...$2.99 (we do still have some left)
Ingredients I keep: Salt and Pepper, Garlic, brown sugar
Total price (from items I don't always have): $10.55
Cost per serving (6 servings, I'm estimating): $1.76
If I subtract the total price so that it only includes what I actually used of each item, that cost per serving would drop. Since I don't usually use apple juice, I'm just going to include it here, though.
Did it taste good?
Yes! We liked it, and it proved to be pretty foolproof given that I made a rather large error and everything still turned out fine.
I am learning to cook new things, and having fun doing it!
If you have any new recipes you would like to try, go for it (and tell us how it went!) Or maybe you have some suggestions for me, like what I should do with all that apple juice. Comments, or send me ideas with my new suggestion box below.
powered by Typeform
Comments
Post a Comment