Slow Cooked Pork Chops in Barbecue Sauce

This was such a delicious meal.   I would have said a few years ago that I didn’t really like barbecue sauce.   I didn’t really see what the fuss was about.   However, since I started making my own sauce, that opinion completely changed.   Of course, you can just make the sauce and not cook the meat in the sauce, but I love to cook pork ribs or chops in the slow cooker together with the sauce so that they absorb all the delicious flavours.  I love how the pork tastes afterwards and the way it just falls apart on the fork.

This recipe makes plenty of sauce so if you are just serving 2 people then you will have some sauce left over, which will keep in the fridge for a few days.   If you are serving up to 4 people, then as long as you have room for more chops in the slow cooker, then you won’t need to make more sauce.

The great thing about this dish is that it is so quick to mix together the ingredients for the barbecue sauce.  You can easily prepare it in the morning, put it in the slow cooker and then come home to a delicious meal in the evening.   I served it with salad and bread, but it would be lovely with chunky chips or potato wedges.

Ingredients – Serves 2 with some sauce left over

40ml balsamic vinegar

20ml Worcester Sauce

150ml tomato ketchup

1 tsp fennel seeds

2 cloves garlic, crushed

1/2 small red chilli pepper

1/2 small green chilli pepper

1 tbsp soft brown sugar

1 onion, chopped

2 pork chops (add more for more people)

How to Make Slow-cooked Pork Chops in Barbecue Sauce

1. Use a measuring jug to mix the sauce ingredients so you can easily see how much you are adding.   Add all the liquids first and then the fennel seeds, garlic, chillies and sugar.

2. Pour a little sauce into the bottom of the slow cooker.  Sit the pork chops on the sauce.   Sprinkle the chopped onion over the top and then top with the rest of the barbecue sauce. Add a little water so that the pork is almost covered, but make sure it doesn’t wash the sauce off the chops.

3. Cook slowly for 7-9 hours.

4. Take the chops out of the sauce and put the sauce over a high heat to reduce and thicken.  It should take a maximum of about 10 minutes.

5. Serve the sauce over the pork chops.

 

Pinchos Morunos – Spanish Pork Skewers

I do like Spanish food and Spain is definitely one of my favourite countries to visit.    In fact, I used to go there every year as a child and so it is the country I have visited the most often.   I’ve always liked the food but didn’t like tapas as a child as I wanted to choose my favourite dish and eat all of it.  Nowadays, I love sharing tapas meals as it’s a chance to try lots of different dishes as well as to eat my favourite – Spanish croquettes.  I love the creaminess on the inside and the crunchiness of the outside.  When I last went to Spain, in November, I ate croquettes about 5 times in just one week.  There were some disappointments though, such as the ones which were frozen in the middle, I sent them back and they were still frozen the second time they came out.  They also forgot one of our dishes, which we decided was probably just as well.    I was also incredibly disappointed once to go to a tapas restaurant in Edinburgh, order croquettes and be given potato ones.  Of course, I like potato ones as well, but they are not Spanish.  So, if I like croquettes so much, why is this post supposedly about pinchos morunos?   Well, I wanted to make a dish for Vanilla Clouds and Lemon Drops’ Sweet Heat Challenge, this month hosted by Janice at Farmersgirl Kitchen.  I needed to make a spicy dish, and as lovely as croquettes are, they are not spicy.  I could have made spicy ones – cheese and jalapeno croquettes would surely be delicious, but the truth is, I just didn’t think of that until it was too late.

So, I decided to make pinchos morunos.   Little skewers of marinated meat are a very popular tapas dish and this is one of the most well-known.  I know, you’ve looked at the picture and are thinking – those are not little skewers of meat! That is not a tapa.  Admittedly, that’s a fair point.  I just happened to make mine a little bit bigger.   Well, I didn’t have any small skewers, and I didn’t want to make lots of small dishes just for two people.  But, I could have so easily made the exact same recipe, plus a few more tapas dishes, served the pork on small skewers and it would have been a great tapas meal.   Instead, I made Spanish rice as a side dish and served the pork on a bed of spinach.  The recipe served two of us, plus enough for leftovers for my lunch the next day.

Ingredients

400g pork tenderloin, diced

1tsp smoked paprika

1 tsp ground coriander

1 tsp cumin

1/2 tsp chilli powder

1 tsp dried oregano

1 tsp dried parsley

1 pinch of saffron

1 clove of garlic, crushed

2 tbsp lemon juice

4 tbsp olive oil

How to make Pinchos Morunos

1. In a bowl, mix together all the ingredients except the pork.   Taste and adjust anything if necessary.

2. Add the pork and stir well so the marinate coats all the pieces of meat.   Put in the fridge for at least 4 hours.

3. Before cooking, thread the meat onto skewers and cook on a griddle pan, grill, or put in the oven.

4. Serve as a main meal or as part of a selection of tapas.

 

 

Shredded Pork Quesadillas

This is my second month taking part in the Secret Recipe Club.   I enjoyed it so much last month I definitely want to keep taking part, even though things are quite hectic at the moment and I’m not managing to blog as much as I’d like and am also way behind on reading other people’s blogs.   Anyway, this month I was paired with Melissa from Melissa’s Cuisine.   She has some great recipes and I couldn’t decide at first whether to try one of her steak or chicken marinades or to go with this.   In the end, as pulled pork is something I’ve been meaning to make for a long time, I decided that this should be the month to try it. Melissa used pork ribs, which I love, but I decided to get a small shoulder of pork and cook it in the slow cooker and then shred it.   This meant I had lots of pork leftover for more meals.   Always a good thing.    The barbecue sauce was really easy to make and the quesadillas were then really simple to put together.  The only thing I would change would be to make the barbecue sauce slightly less sweet, but this might just be a personal thing as I don’t normally like to mix sweet and savoury together.   Although I didn’t use the exact same proportions as Melissa, she did warn that it makes quite a sweet sauce and so next time I would use even less sugar – maybe just a teaspoon.   Apart from that, this was definitely a success and something that I will make again.   For the Melissa’s original recipe have a look here.

I am also linking this to Family Fresh Cooking.

Ingredients – serves 2

2 flour tortillas

Approx 300g shredded pork

Approx 80g grated cheese

Barbecue Sauce Ingredients

1 tbsp brown sugar

100ml ketchup

2 Tablespoons white wine vinegar

1 clove crushed garlic

1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce

1 red chilli, finely diced

How to make Shredded Pork Quesadillas and Barbecue Sauce

1. I put some pork shoulder in the slow cooker in the morning and in the evening it was ready.   I removed all the fat and used two forks to shred it.   You could also roast it in the oven if you prefer.

2. To make the barbecue sauce, add all the sauce ingredients to a small saucepan.   Bring to the boil and let simmer for about 15 minutes.   Mix the pork into the sauce and heat through.

3. Put a tortilla in the bottom of a frying pan.    Cover with the shredded pork then the cheese.  Put another tortilla on top.   Leave to cook over a low heat for about 5 minutes.

4. Turn the tortilla.    Slide it onto a plate.   Put another plate on top.    Flip it over quickly then slide it back into the pan.   Cook for another 5 minutes.

To see what other Secret Recipe Club members have made, click on the link below:

 

365 Challenge: Curried Pork

When I first looked at this recipe I have to admit that I was sceptical.  I like to make curries by adding different spices and experimenting to get different flavours.   If a recipe just says curry powder, I imagine that it’s going to be a bit boring.   Nevertheless, I’d chosen to make this as part of the 365 Challenge so there was no getting out of it.   I knew I had to make it.    Another problem was that my lovely husband does not like dried fruit, is not keen on nuts and loves really hot and spicy curries.   I knew this dish would not suit him and so I decided to adapt it to serve just one – myself, while I also made a one person sized serving of pork vindaloo for him.   At least we would both eat the same rice!

So how was it?   I love it when I am wrong about my expectations about a dish.   I loved this so much that I made a very similar version the next day to use up some of the cream.   If my husband liked dried fruit, it would become a regular dish.   Oh well, all that cream.   Maybe it’s just as well he wouldn’t like it.

This dish is part of the 365 Challenge which is run by Murdoch Books.  The team are cooking their way through each dish in Stephane Reynaud’s 365 Good Reasons to Sit Down to Eat.  This dish has been adapted from his recipe for curried pork tenderloin.

Ingredients – serves 1

1 pork chop

1 small onion, sliced

1 carrot, cut into thin slices

10g sultanas

2 dried apricots

1 dried prune

10g flaked almonds

10g pistachio nuts

1 tsp hot curry powder

100ml stock

20ml double cream

oil

How to Make Curried Pork

1. Heat a little oil in a saucepan and add the onion.  Fry until softened.

2. Add the carrot, dried fruit, nuts and curry powder.   Stir then add the stock.

3. Bring to the boil then simmer for about 10 minutes.    Add the cream and heat through.

4. Heat some more oil in a frying pan.   Season the pork chop and cook for about 4 minutes on each side, more or less depending on the thickness.

5. Serve the pork with rice and top with the curry sauce.

 

Slow Cooked Barbecue Ribs

This is my first month of taking part in the Secret Recipe Club. If you like the idea of being a secret agent then this is the perfect event to give you that feeling.  About a month ago I was sent my assignment: 365 Days of Baking.  This blog is written my Lynne, who manages to bake something every day.   Now that is impressive!   So even though she only began her blog this year there are over a hundred recipes on her site, so I didn’t have any trouble finding things I wanted to make.   I liked the fact that part the reason for her writing a blog was to have a place to keep recipes she’s been given by family and friends and one of the things I liked most about her site is that she rates all her recipes, with 1 rolling pin being the worst, and 4 rolling pins being the best.    Once I discovered this through a little secret investigation, I decided to focus on her best recipes – the ones with 4 rolling pins.

It wasn’t long before I came across this recipe for barbecue spare ribs.   It was a long time since I’d last made spare ribs, before I began my blog, and I’ve never posted a recipe for them, so I knew at that moment that what my blog was lacking was a killer spare rib recipe – and it seemed like I might have just found it.   Now, the last time I made spare ribs I made them in my slow cooker and they turned out absolutely gorgeously and the one slight issue Lynne mentioned with this recipe, was that the meat was not quite at the falling off the bone stage in some places.     As I’m going through a slow cooker phase at the moment, I decided to adapt the method but the ingredients are almost the same.

And the verdict:  They were lovely, the meat was tender, falling off the bone and full of flavour and the sauce was amazing.   According to my husband:  ‘This is the best new recipe you’ve made in a long time’.   Need I say more.   It looks like I’ll be making them again soon.

If you don’t have a slow cooker, don’t worry, just have a look at the original recipe on 365 Days of Baking.

Ingredients – Serves 2

500g ribs

1 tbsp light brown sugar

20ml  Worcester Sauce

30ml soy sauce

20ml cider vinegar

40ml ketchup

2 red chillies

1/2 tsp mustard

1 clove of garlic, crushed

Pinch black pepper

How to make Barbecue Ribs

1. Mix all the ingredients for the sauce.

2. Arrange the ribs in the bottom of the slowcooker.    Pour the sauce over the top.   Add a little extra water so the ribs are covered.    Cook for 9 hours.

3. Before serving, drain the liquid into a small saucepan and boil to reduce.   Serve the reduced sauce over the top of the ribs.

To see what everyone else has make, click on the link below:

 

Pork with mustard sauce

I don’t think I’ve made a white sauce on this blog before.  It’s not something I often make, but today I felt like going back to my cooking roots.    Why do I say cooking roots?   Well, before I went to university, a basic roux sauce was one of the first things my mum taught me so that I could make a basic cheese sauce to go with pasta.   It turned out to be a dish that I made again and again.   Creamy, cheesy, mild.   It was everything that I liked at the time.   But so different from what I tend to choose these days.   Now, I like much stronger flavours and if I made that old pasta dish these days I’d have to use a really strong cheese or put loads of cheese into it to get enough flavour.   Back then I was all about subtle and mild.   These days I like my food to have a kick to it.   So, that’s where the mustard comes in.    Mild plain roux sauce and then spice it up with a big dollop of mustard, lots of pepper, a bit of garlic, and as I was feeling a tad wild, just a tiny drop of whisky.

Ingredients

300ml milk

1/2  tbsp flour

Small knob butter

300g pork tenderloin

1.5 tsp yellow mustard

2 cloves garlic

Black pepper

Very small dash whisky (optional)

How to make Pork with Mustard Sauce

1. Season the pork with salt and pepper.  Seal on all sides in a frying pan.

2. Wrap the pork in a parcel made of kitchen foil and bake in the oven for about 25 minutes. When ready, let it rest for 5 minutes before slicing and serving.

3. To make the sauce, melt the butter and a little oil in a saucepan.   Add the flour and stir as it cooks for about 2 minutes.

4. Begin to add the milk.  Add a dash at a time and mix so it combines gradually with the flour and makes a smooth sauce.   If too much milk is added at once it becomes lumpy.

5. Add the crushed garlic, mustard, whisky and seasoning.   Stir while simmering gently for about 5 minutes as the sauce thickens.   Taste and adjust any seasonings as necessary.

6. Serve the sauce with the pork along with potatoes and vegetables.