My Favourite Cool Weather Recipe

Okay, so it's the third in the series of bi-weekly blog questions for the autumn swap I'm doing. This question is about cooking.

“What is your favorite cool weather recipe?”

I enjoy using my slow cooker all year round, and lately I seem to be obsessed with working on variations of this simple recipe:

1 pork roast (I use tenderloin)
1 can apple pie filling
1 bottle BBQ sauce

You just throw it all in the crockpot and cook it until the meat can be shredded with two forks, then you make a pulled pork sandwich out of it. It's really good on a sturdy, rustic bread like ciabatta.

I rarely follow that recipe exactly, however, since it's too basic for my liking. So here are some of my variations:

• Use chicken or turkey instead of pork. Dark meat is best since white meat can be dry.


• Substitute apple sauce and chopped fresh apples for the apple pie filling (which can be pretty expensive).


• Throw in some caramelized onions, sliced peppers, mushrooms, or celery, whatever suits your taste and can be chopped small enough to still work in a sandwich.


• Spice it up a bit. Still use a sweet BBQ sauce, but throw in some salsa (salsa verde works great!) or better yet, some fajita cooking sauce (I use PC Memories of Mexico Fajita Sauce, which is a Canadian brand. I'm sure there are many others out there to choose from.) I guess you could also use a dry fajita spice mix.

Oh, and don't forget to add some chopped fresh garlic -- but watch out! Sometimes when you cook garlic, it turns blue-green. Has anyone seen that before? It happened to me just recently and I googled it. Apparently, it has something to do with traces of copper and sulfur being released when immature garlic is cooked in an acid. The green garlic is harmless, but not very appetizing. I read that if you leave garlic out of the fridge for two weeks before cooking with it, it will "mature" properly and the blue-green thing will not happen. I haven't tested the theory.

If you are interested in crockpot cooking, for those of you on Ravelry, I recommend the Crockpot Love group as a source of information and recipes for crockpots. There is also the Year of Slow Cooking web site, which is a very good non-Ravelry source of information and recipes.