sauce – Dad's Turn To Cook

Okay, so for today’s challenge I had a couple of criteria.

1) I had about half a can of pineapple left over from making pizza that I needed to use up
2) We have a couple picky eaters that had been opting out of some of the meals as of late. I try not to take it personally. (I wounds me to the core).

Enter…meatballs! Everybody likes meatballs, don’t they? A bit of googling found me this beauty of a recipe.

Baked Sweet and Sour Meatballs

Overall, the recipe itself was pretty easy to make. Essentially all a meatball is, is a tiny round hamburger. Now, the link there called for ground turkey, chicken or pork. I went with beef as it is what I happened to have on hand (being a good prairie boy and all…). Pork is cheaper at the store, I’ve never really enjoyed ground pork. Don’t get me wrong, I find the best hamburger and meatball recipes around typically have some sort of ratio of beef to pork, I just didn’t have any handy. I also just went with 1lb of protein (as opposed to the 1.5 called for) as that’s how I portion out meat for the freezer. That worked out though – I’ll explain how in a bit….

If you want to get fancy, you can break out a kitchen scale and weigh your meatballs for the sake of consistency. I didn’t bother. What you can do is grab an ice cream scoop or a large spoon and use that to scoop out what will become your meatball. There is something to be said about some standardization with these. It helps with cooking time, it also helps avoid any “but his is bigger!” comparisons when you’re dishing everything out at the table.

For the sauce? Follow the recipe. It worked out great. In fact, my wife and I almost came down to a coin flip for the leftovers on this one before I graciously let her have them (awww, such a nice guy, right?). It’s a sweet sauce with a touch of kick. Very flavourful. And the best part? As I made 1lb of meatballs, there was plenty of sauce left over to spoon over the rice.

Have I mentioned my trick to good brown rice? 2 cups water for every 1 cup of rice. Put rice in water. Put on high heat covered. When the water starts to boil, lift the lid, stir things up. Put the lid back on, turn the heat down to around…3. Walk away for 45 minutes. Come back, take off heat, Lift lid, fluff with fork. Bam.

The real trick of course is to use a pot that is about one size larger than you think you’ll need. Stops the rice from boiling over. That stuff is a PAIN to clean off your stove.

-g

When you’re working on a budget, you grab the deals. So yes, when you have the chance to snag an entire pork loin for relatively little cash, you grab that deal, you chop it up into meal sized roasts and you go with it. One thing I’ve noticed when you’re working with a particular cut of meat is getting into a rut with how you prepare it. For me (and I’m shaking my head as I write this) the ‘old standby’ is a bbq pulled pork (I’m shaking my head as I presently have one in the crockpot…). Sometimes you just need to shake it up, and with a little help from Google and some more seasoned bloggers, sometimes you stumble upon something quite amazing. I give you…

Ginger Glazed Pork Roast

Now the usual words of warning I’ll give when doing anything in a slow cooker.

Make sure you have plenty of time…it’s called a slow cooker for a reason.
Try to make sure your meat has been thoroughly thawed overnight if you’re working from a recipe and checking out their cook times.

# 2 is where I ran into an issue on this one. I didn’t take the roast out and let it thaw overnight, so I went straight into the slow-cooker and had to crank it up to high to finish in time for dinner. Bad move. I have a little chart that shows pork roasts should hit at least 145 degrees F to be considered done. I went WELL beyond that. Still edible, but almost to the point of crunchy. What can I say? Rookie move. But that’s why we eat every day, right? Plenty of chances to learn, adjust and excel on the next attempt.

That’s the roast. I had about a 1.5 lb cut…I would trim back the amount of rub as there was PLENTY left that really just went to waste. Now for the star of the show. There’s a pizza place in Regina that has the marketing slogan “The Sauce Is Boss”, and that is definitely an adage that is in play with this meal. It works, it is the spotlight and dang is it tasty. I’m not just saying that as I completely over-cooked the roast and the sauce was the only thing that turned out, this glaze just ‘works’ and it is quite easy to do. A notable change I made to the linked recipe? I found that my glaze was just a bit too runny and the cornstarch wasn’t really having an impact on thickening things up while it was on the burner. I added some more and it sorted itself out. One quick reminder on that – NEVER add cornstarch directly to a sauce without first making it into a paste with a very small splash of water. Straight cornstarch just turns into little clumps you’ll wind up straining out before using (unless you’re a fan of some little flavour powder shots in your meals – just like Grandma used to make!). A little water, a little whisk and you’re good to go. And when you DO start adding some cornstarch to thicken, do it a little bit at a time. You can very quickly go from a rather runny sauce, to straight up pudding.

I followed the glaze recipe verbatim with the exception of substituting white vinegar for rice vinegar (it’s what I had on hand) and using powdered ginger rather than fresh (again, I had it on hand).

This one is going in the rotation. And the slow-cooker a little earlier next time so I can roast it on “low”.

-g