Slow Cooking Pulled Pork

It was a quiet Easter Sunday and since I don't have family obligations anymore I wanted to make a no fuss dinner that could be great leftovers too. I decided to make Pulled Pork in the Crockpot and cook it low and slow which also meant I didn't have to worry about something being on the stove or burning in the oven. I took a huge piece of pork shoulder and mixed up a spice rub.

The spice rub I used contained the following ingredients:

Brown Sugar
Paprika
Cayenne
Garlic Powder
Onion Flakes
Thyme
Salt
Pepper
Dry Mustard


You can use any combination of spices according to your taste but this is what I mixed up.

I rubbed the pork shoulder and put it into an already heated Crock pot and then covered the meat with chicken stock, that's what I had but beef stock would be good too or if you like you could add Beer or whatever kind of liquid just to give it something to cook in.

I added a few drops of liquid chipotle and some tabasco sauce and just let it cook low and slow for about 4 - 5 hours or until the meat would just seperate without a knife. I then shredded the meat with 2 forks and added a bit of bbq sauce to moisten it up and give it a last bit of flavour. I would have made my own bbq sauce but I was too lazy so just do what you want and as long as you use good spices and ingredients and cook it for a long time it will come out great.

I was going to make a pulled pork sandwich but since I didn't have any buns I decided to make corn grits instead since that only takes a few minutes to cook.

Not sure where this Southern Comfort cooking craving is coming from but guess it's my go to food at the moment.

I seem to be gravitating towards simple, hearty and comfort feeling food. Must be the weather and my mood lately. But you can't beat the taste of this stuff.

This is what a crock pot should be used for.

Life, Food, Death

My mother and me serving cake. I think I was 7.. excuse the bad haircut.

I haven't been able to blog for the passed week because my mother passed away last week from of all things a lack of nutrition because of Dementia.

I never thought that my mother's life would end that way. My mother was a survivor of the Aushwitz concentration camps in Germany during the war and survived on eating very little while she was in the war and afterward but made a point to make sure we always had a fridge full of food and was always trying to offer food to friends and family. My mother was a little forgetful and then a lot more forgetful over the past 5 years and then last year we had to put her into a nursing home because she needed care 24/7 for her safety. I guess my first indication should have been the reduction of the things she would cook or bake. After my mother retired she would bake cookies when she was bored. Then she stopped baking cookies and switched to frying wontons and adding powdered sugar on them and would go to the neighbourhood bank, pharmacy and her doctors office and hand out wontons to whoever wanted them. Then it stopped. The only thing she would make was instant coffee and that started to become confusing. Freezer food would end up in the fridge and fridge food would end up in the freezer. I suppose that should have been clues to the progression of her illness. Before she went into the home she went to a day program where they supplied meals 3 times a day so all she would eat at home was snacks of bananas, yoghurts, mandarin oranges and any chocolates or treats I would leave on hand for her to grab. Everything had to be simplified for her to be able to maintain independence on what she chose to eat.

January of 2010 she was placed in a home where they provided the not so great meals. Myself and my mother's friend would bring her chocolate treats when we visited. Everything changed this past January though. She went into the Hospital for pneumonia and somewhere toward the end of her 2 week stay she started refusing food. They discharged her only to return to the home with a c-difficile virus which would further aggravate her condition. She became very week after her 2 week hospital stay and started eating less and less. She was so week that she fell a couple of times and went back and forth to the hospital for xrays. By the time she went back to the home after all of that she could no longer walk due to swelling of her ankles and then she had more difficulty swallowing and eating food. Thus began the decent. She became dehydrated and her blood pressure dropped and she still had the c-difficile infection so they had to send her back to the hospital. I insisted that she be sent to Sunnybrook Hospital this time. She spend 2 more weeks in the hospital and had the infection cleared up and was placed on an iv drip and rehydrated but the problem was that she refused food more and more until the only thing she would eat was pudding. The doctors told me that there was nothing they could do if she refused food and they had done all that they could do medically so they had to send her back to the home. My mother wasn't happy being in the hospital tied to a bed so I agreed to send her back. I knew that if she didn't eat that she wouldn't have long to live after that. She returned to the home and I would bring her strawberry applesauce and puddings just to get her to eat something. Until she even refused that. There was nothing anyone could do to force her to eat so she just wasted away until her body couldn't support her anymore. My mother was a survivor and fighter all her life but I think this time she stopped fighting and wanted to go on her terms with food being the only thing she could control in her life. It is heartbreaking to watch someone die that way because there is nothing you can do to help change it. So my mother ended her long life of survival at 88 years old. I hope wherever she is there is an abundance of food that she is enjoying again.

This experience made me realize that when we are born the first thing we do is eat to sustain life and we spend our whole life eating for pleasure, pain, nutrition, control and to help or hinder our health.

For a foodie like me it's unbelievable how much damage eating badly or forced starvation can do to your body. I know what foods are good for me but I don't always prefer to eat them. There is a whole mind/body/food connection that is very complex and I don't know if we will ever really just eat to support maximum nutrition for our bodies. There is always a lot more things going on in connection to food.

So my thoughts about this are that we are born, we eat, we live and then we die, so we might as well enjoy every bite of food while we can while not letting food take over our lives. We need to Eat to Live and not Live to Eat.

Cannelloni - pasta perfection

I think my all time favourite food is Italian. Italian food is simplicity made perfect. You can take 3 ingredients and make the most satisfying meal. What are the 3 ingredients?

1. Tomato sauce or some sort of savoury sauce
2. Pasta or dough
3. Cheese

That's all you need to make a great meal already but with a few other ingredients you can make something that can satisfy your soul.

Italians rarely cook with actual recipes they usually cook by feel and with love. I grew up on a street with many Italian families and learned that although they were similar they were not the same. The sauces and the choice of pastas seemed to differ and the end results were slightly different even using the same sort of basic ingredients.

Italian food is my go to food when I want something that tastes good and is quick and easy.

This time I decided to make Cannelloni because I never make that and had some ingredients in the fridge that would be great in a Cannelloni.

This is what I did:

Recipe of the Day:

1 Box of Cannelloni noodles
1/2 small log of goat cheese
1 container of Ricotta cheese
1 can of San Marzano tomatoes
1/2 small onion
1 package of spinach leaves
2 garlic cloves
1 tsp. of basil pesto
1/3 of a cup of grated mozzarella
3 tbsp of grated parmesan cheese
1 tbsp olive oil
salt and pepper to taste

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
Rinse and slightly chop the spinach leaves and set aside
Mince the garlic cloves and dice the onion and set aside.

In a bowl mix the ricotta cheese, goat cheese and a tablespoon of parmesan and mozzarella cheese. Add salt and pepper to taste and set aside.

In a large frying pan add olive oil to a hot pan and then saute the spinach. Once it is bright green and cooked down take it out of the pan and set aside.

Add a little more oil to the pan and saute the onions and garlic until the onions are translucent. Add in the can of tomatoes and you can add fresh tomatoes as well. Mash the tomatoes into a sauce like consistency. Add a teaspoon of basil pesto or dried basil flakes or you can add fresh basil at the end. Cook the tomato sauce for about 20 minutes or until the sauce is the way you prefer it. You can add water if you want a thinner sauce. You need to make it thinner than usual because it will cook the pasta in the oven.

Once the sauce is cooked you can assemble the Cannelloni.

In a baking dish add some of the sauce to the bottom of the pan just like the way you would make a lasagna.

Add the chopped spinach to the cheese mixture and you can put the mixture into a Ziploc bag and cut a small hole at the corner of the bag to be able to pipe it out into the cannelloni noodles. Take one of the uncooked cannelloni noodles and pipe the mixture into the inside of the noodle. you can use a small spoon to push it in if you need to. Place the filled cannelloni noodles in the baking pan side by side. Do not layer them on top of each other. Keep filling the cannelloni noodles until you run out of filling.

Add the remaining tomato sauce on top of the noodles and then sprinkle the rest of the mozzarella cheese and parmesan cheese on top.

Cover with tin foil and place in the preheated oven.

Cook for about 45 minutes or whatever the package of cannelloni noodles require.

And it should look like my photo if you did it all the same way.

It may not look like a perfect picture but the taste of it will feel like love on a plate.

Italian food is food of love... and I do love it...
Enjoy.