As some of us are moving away from Chicago, we decided to have on ell set supper together. Now usually, I run out of food, so this time I decided to be proactive and triple the recipe. Wellp – that backfired as yet again I have left overs for days. Pork on pork on pork! Also, I finally used my Slow Cooker Magazine (No. 87, pg. 79) and made a recipe from it (an awesome investment if I say so myself)!
Recipe:
Ingredients for the pork:
– 9 lbs of pork shoulder
– 7 large oranges to squeeze the juice out of
– 2 packets oregano
– 2 teaspoons cumin
– 2 teaspoons paprika
– 7/8 cup lime juice
– 15 cloves of garlic chopped
– 1 red onion coarsely chopped
– 1/2 cup olive oil
– 10 grinds of sea salt per a crock pot
– 10 grinds black pepper
Now let me just say the only part of the recipe I successfully tripled was the amount of pork. So moving on from there, let’s go through my other moments where my math skills proved to be less than stellar.
The marinade calls for fresh and strained orange juice, so naturally I took this as the need to buy 7 oranges (I should I have bought 9 to triple the recipe) and squeeze them all by hand. This process would Havel been more efficient if I had a juicer. Then came the lime juice. Now I only bought one container of lime juice because I thought that one container = 1 cup. First off, I really needed 1 and 1/2 cup of lime juice to properly triple the recipe, but the lime juice container only had 7/8 cups of lime juice, so that’s when I went with. Next came the olive oil. Now the original recipe calls for 1/4 cup of olive oil, so of course tripling means 1/2 cup…not! Yet that is what I put into the marinade.
As you can tell my math skills were seriously lacking when I did this marinade, yet I continued. The onion yet again caused me to cry, and yet again I got the math wrong. I needed 1 and 1/2 onion, yet I only put one onion in the marinade. Then came the garlic. I ended up cutting 20 cloves of garlic which was not the right amount, I needed 30 cloves. Next comes the two packages of orange oregano springs (really this should have been three). Lastly comes the spices, and shockingly I managed to get this wrong as well. I really needed 3 teaspoons of both paprika and cumin, and yet I only put in 2 teaspoons.
Despite all of my mathematical failures, I was able to put the pork in a “containers” to marinade for 24 hours. Now we don’t have big zip lock bags in the apartment, so instead I ended up using three times of plastic bags. For an example, look at the picture below:
Then I cooked the pork in two crock pots for 8 hrs on low.
Ingredients for watermelon-tomato salsa
– 1/2 watermelon diced into small cubes
– 2 containers of yellow cherry tomatoes
– 1cup coarsely chopped fresh cilantro
– 1 jalapeño
– 6 limes to squeeze juice out of
Now while the crock pots were cooking, I made the watermelon – tomato salsa. This proved to be super refreshing, and a great pair with the pork. The most difficult part was cutting up the watermelon, but other than that it was a smooth preparation. The major part was cutting and everything needed to be cut finely, expect for the tomatoes which needed to be cut in half. I would serve this as an appetizer as well.
Review:
A huge success! Everyone said this was the best dish yet and it was paired I with tortillas to wrap it all together. Soo Goood!!
The Nitty Gritty:
– Total Cost: $40.00
– Total Time: 9 hrs
– Serving Size: 24 people
Crock-a-Dile Pot 