The Fourth of July is upon us, and while many people will be prepping grills and wood piles for their festivities, can I interest you in an alternative One that doesn’t require standing over a flaming rack of meat in the peak of American summer and does most of the cooking work on its own over the course of a day?

If so, this pulled pork is for you!

It’s taken me a long time to come around to pulled pork. I’m not generally a fan of shredded meat… it often makes me feel like I’m eating like, I don’t know, hair or something But lately I’ve been unable to resist the ease of dumping a pork roast in the slow cooker, going to work, and coming home to a ready-made dinner that will last us for DAYS.

The key to this recipe is using smoked paprika. I keep both smoked paprika and regular paprika at home, and I can tell you: they really do taste different. Since I can’t make real barbecue at myself by roasting a pig over coals for hours on end, the smokiness in the paprika really helps it taste more like the real deal.

Once the roast has cooked for 9 hours or so, you’ll be amazed at how easily it shreds. I just use a couple of serving forks and it falls apart easily and quickly.

This pork tastes utterly delightful straight out of the pot. I, however, also like to boost it up at the end with just a bit of barbecue sauce. But, you can also just serve extra sauce on the side. Either way, you’re in for a delightfully satisfying meal that will be welcome at any of your holiday festivities, or as a week’s worth of dinners just for your household.

Happy Fourth!

Slow Cooker Barbecue Pulled Pork
Adapted from Slow Cooker Gourmet

Note: This feeds… a lot of people. It makes enough pork for 14-16 sandwiches using regular-sized buns. If you’re making this for just a couple of people, feel free to halve it so you don’t have to commit to eating all-pork-all-the-time for several days.

5-6 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp kosher salt
2 T smoked paprika
2 T dark brown sugar
3/4 tsp black pepper
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
2 pound pork roast, trimmed of excess
3 T apple cider vinegar
2 T water
2 yellow onions (small to medium) thinly sliced
1/3 – 1/2 c of your favorite barbecue sauce (optional)

Mince the garlic and mix it together with the salt on a cutting board. The mixture should form a gooey paste. Mix the paprika, brown sugar, black pepper, and cayenne in a separate bowl and set aside.

Rub the garlic paste onto both sides of the pork. Then rub the spice mixture into the pork on all sides.

Add the apple cider vinegar and water to the bottom of a slow cooker. Place the rubbed pork into the slow cooker and include any bits of spice that have fallen off onto the cutting board. Thinly slice the onion and mound it around the pork.

Cook on low for 8-10 hours. When you are ready to serve, remove the pork to a cutting board and shred it using large forks. Return it to the slow cooker and mix in the liquid and the onions. Adjust seasoning to taste. If desired, add 1/3 – 1/2 c of your favorite barbecue sauce. Heat on high for 10-15 more minutes to allow the sauce to heat up. Alternately, you can add barbecue to the meat separately when serving.

Serve on buns, or just with forks, or however you like your pork.

Ever since I developed my recipe for fajita seasoning, I’ve been pretty lazy on the taco recipe front. The fajita seasoning is sooo versatile: virtually any taco, fajita, quesadilla, etc. can be fully-flavored with it. Plus, it’s quick to make with spices that I always have on hand. I go through batches of it at a fairly rapid clip.

But in the throes of my recent love affair with sweet cherries, I stumbled across this recipe. Pork, rubbed with a paste of garlic, lime, and ground chipotle and topped with charred onions, peppers, queso fresco, and a bright, cherry salsa studded with cilantro and lime Um, YES.

These tacos are delightfully flavorful. The smoky chipotle plays nicely with the bright, sweet, fruity cherries and limes. And while I typically look to chicken or steak for my tacos, the pork is really the best canvas here. The rub and the salsa can be made well in advance, but they certainly don’t have to. This is definitely a weeknight-worthy operation.

This batch makes enough filling for about 8 tacos, but it can easily be changed to feed a crowd. Plus, if you store the different toppings separately, this makes INCREDIBLE leftovers.

So if you, like me, have not yet released your grip on summer cherries, put these tacos on your to do list for the week.

Pork Tacos with Cherry-Lime Salsa
Adapted from Eating Well

Makes about 8 tacos

For the Pork
2 cloves garlic
1 tsp salt
1 tsp ground chipotle pepper
zest of two limes
4 tsp fresh lime juice
1 lb pork tenderloin (I used strips for mine, but that’s just what I had on hand)

Mince garlic. Combine garlic and salt in a bowl and press with a spoon (or use a mortar and pestle) until it forms a paste. Add chipotle, lime zest, and lime juice and mix well. Rub paste all over pork. Refrigerate until other ingredients are prepared.

For the Salsa
1 c pitted & chopped fresh sweet cherries (use dark red if you can for the drama!)
1/4 c finely chopped cilantro
4 tsp fresh lime juice
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp ground chipotle pepper

Combine all ingredients in a small dish and set aside. You’ll add some onion once you’ve charred it, so keep the salsa close by.

Assembly
3 T canola oil, divided
1 medium white or yellow onion, sliced in half-moons
1 green bell pepper, seeded and sliced into strips
2-3 cranks freshly ground black pepper
pinch of course salt
3/4 c crumbled queso fresco
8 taco-sized flour or white-corn tortillas

Heat two medium-sized skillets over medium and add 1 1/2 T of oil to each one. In one pan, add the onions, peppers, pepper, and salt. Toss frequently until onions and peppers are slightly charred and have softened slightly, about 10 minutes. Meanwhile, add the seasoned pork to the other pan. Cook until pork reaches a 145°F internal temperature and all sides are golden-brown.

Remove 6-7 slices of onion and chop finely. Add these to the cherry salsa.

To warm tortillas, place in the oven at 170°F on a cookie sheet that has another cookie sheet as a lid for 5-10 minutes. The lid will prevent the tortillas from becoming crispy. Or, place them in a stack on a plate with another plate as a lid and microwave for 30 seconds.

Add a bit of pork, peppers and onions, salsa, and queso fresco to each tortilla.

I told you on Thursday, when I posted this Ginger Apple Chutney, that I would have a recipe utilizing it that would blow your dang socks off. This, my friends, is it.

I must be honest: until about one year ago, I never so much as ordered potstickers or Chinese dumplings as take-out. I thought they looked, frankly, kind of gross. So sad and pekid compared to the seemingly superior fried wontons farther down the menu.

Oh, how times have changed.

Suddenly, I’ve become obsessed with these tiny pouches of savory filling. I order them whenever I find them on a menu and often abandon any pretense of planning to order an entree, simply doubling up on potstickers. As someone who loves ravioli, finger food, and anything dippable, I really can’t say why it took me 25 years to see the salty, potsticker-y light.

And what better way to truly embrace the potsticker than to make them from scratch Having found this fantastic recipe for filling, I also wanted to try my hand at making homemade wonton/potsticker wrappers. That’s just sort of what I do here.

While it is a bit time-consuming and I totally understand if you want to buy yours from the store, I urge you to try it at least once from scratch, especially if you have a pasta crank. These homemade wrappers are soft, not at all rubbery, and can be made in any size that you want (though I found a 3-inch diameter to be absolutely perfect).

Like most doughs, homemade wonton wrappers start with a sifter full of flour, some warm water, and a fork.

Once the dough is mixed, barely pliable due to its low moisture content, it needs to sit for a while. Just cover the bowl with a damp cloth so the little moisture that IS in this dough doesn’t escape.

After an hour or so, the dough is kneaded for a few minutes until it’s fairly smooth. From here, you have a few options to turn this mound of wheat flour into paper thin wonton wrappers. The source recipe I used for these recommends rolling the dough into a log, slicing the log into discs, and rolling each disc to the desired thickness that will hopefully yield a 3-inch circle.

I decided to scrap those suggestions and take advantage of two of my favorite kitchen gadgets: my pasta crank and a 3-inch Tartmaster (whose full talents weren’t utilized today but that I’ve used on other projects).

Let me once again bestow praise upon my pasta crank. No, it’s not something you absolutely need in your kitchen. But if you have any of the DIY pasta impluses that I do, I highly recommend the investment. I bought a pretty cheap one for about $35 a couple years ago, and for my purposes, it serves me incredibly well. I daydream about those beautiful, fandangled KitchenAid pasta attachments, but I’m gonna need to wait for a wealthier day than this to add those to my arsenal.

But in the meantime, I still used this cheap little crank to form about 50 perfectly round, uniform wonton wraps.

With my tidy little stack of wonton wraps ready to go, it was time to start the filling. I’d already made a batch of ginger apple chutney, so the rest of the filling came together rather quickly. Don’t worry: if you don’t can and don’t want to make the full-size batch, I’ve included a proportional recipe below that will give you just the right amount to make this filling. So you have no excuse.

The chutney is added to a pound of ground pork, which is seasoned with a bit of soy sauce and studded with some fresh, green scallions. It took all of my willpower not to shovel spoons full of it before a single potsticker was made.

But I resisted. And soon, my little potsticker factory was a-churnin’.

To cook them, the key is to have a flat-bottomed pan with a lid. A sauté pan is perfect, but a lidded frying pan or even a wide, lidded pot will work in a pinch. The potstickers are first pan-fried on one side in a bit of oil and then blasted with a little chicken stock to steam. They cook very quickly, so make sure you don’t start cooking them until right before you are ready to eat.

Because trust me: once you do have them cooked, you will absolutely not be able to resist eating every single potsticker in sight.

Homemade Wonton Wrappers
Adapted from La Fuji Mama

Makes 40-55 wrappers

2 c all purpose flour
1/2 tsp salt
about 3/4 c very hot water
additional flour for rolling

Sift flour and salt together into a large, wide bowl. Add water a little at a time until you have about 1/4 c of water remaining. Mix flour and water with a fork or chopsticks to form a dough, switching to your fingers when it becomes too difficult to mix with a fork. Add as much of the remaining water as you need to gather all dry ingredients into the dough. Dough should be very stiff and not sticky. Form dough into a ball and leave it in the bowl. Cover the bowl with a damp cloth and allow dough to rest for one hour.

Once dough has rested, remove it from the bowl and knead for 5-10 minutes until dough is fairly smooth. Break off a small chunk of the dough and return the rest to the cloth-covered bowl. If you have a pasta crank, run the small piece of dough through the machine several times, starting on the largest setting and running the dough through at least one time on each setting all the way to “1”. The result should be a long, very thin piece of dough about 4-5 inches wide. If you do not have a pasta crank, roll the dough as thin as you can with a rolling pin on a floured surface.

Use a round cookie cutter or biscuit cutter about 3″ in diameter to cut out your wrappers. Dust each side generously with flour until the whole wrapper feels dusty and slightly gritty. This will allow you to stack the wrappers without them sticking together. Continue this process until all dough has been utilized, recombining the scraps to prevent wasting any.

Wrap stack of wrappers tightly with plastic wrap and refrigerate until you are ready to add the filling.

Pork & Ginger Apple Potstickers
Adapted from Katie at the Kitchen Door and Alton Brown

Makes 40-45 potstickers

NOTE: I thought it would be a brilliant idea to cook half of these & save the rest for the next day in the fridge. It was not. They all stuck together and tore as I tried to separate them. If you don’t want to cook them all at once, I recommend either keeping the filling separate and making the potstickers right before you cook them, or, you can freeze the constructed potstickers on a cookie sheet and then bag them up for storage. Then, thaw them out for a couple of hours before cooking.

For the Filling
40-50 wonton wrappers (see recipe above or use store-bought, round if you can find them)
1 pound ground pork
1/4 tsp black pepper
2/3 c scallions, chopped into 1/4″ pieces (whites & greens)
3 T soy sauce
1 c ginger apple chutney
OR
Combine the following ingredients according to the instructions listed here to make a batch of chutney proportioned for the potstickers.
1/3 c onion, diced
2 tsp minced fresh ginger
2 medium crisp apples, peeled & diced into 1/4″ pieces
1 T lemon juice
1 tsp canola oil
1/8 tsp salt
1/8 tsp black pepper
1/4 c apple cider
1/4 c apple cider vinegar

If you are making the small-portion batch of chutney, prepare that recipe first and set chutney aside.

Cook pork until lightly browned using a spatula to break chunks into small pieces. Drain off the excess grease and place pork in a large bowl. Add the black pepper, scallions, soy sauce, and chutney and mix well. Adjust seasoning to taste.

Place 12 wonton wrappers out on a cutting board. Scoop 1-2 tablespoons of filling onto the center of each wonton wrapper. It may take you a few attempts to determine the right amount: the potsticker, when sealed, should be full but not so full that it cannot be sealed closed. Dip the tip of your finger into water and lightly moisten the edge of the wonton wrapper all the way around. Fold the edges together to form a half-moon shape and squeeze the edges to form a seal. For added seal and decoration, you can fold the corners in slightly and make small folds in the edging. Place filled potstickers on another board and cover with a cloth to prevent them from drying out. Continue until all filling has been used.

Cooking the Potstickers
canola or vegetable oil
chicken stock, about 1 cup
chopped fresh chives (for garnishing)

Heat a sauté pan that has a lid (though the lid should not be on it right now) over medium heat. Measure out 1/4 cup of chicken stock and set aside. Brush a bit of oil onto the surface of the pin to form a very thin layer. Place potstickers on their sides into the pan, adding as many to the pan as will fit with a bit of space separating them (I was able to fit 12 in at a time). Allow potstickers to cook WITHOUT MOVING THEM for 2-3 minutes. Holding the 1/4 cup of chicken stock in one hand and the lid of the pan in the other, quickly pour the stock into the pan and immediately place the lid onto the pan. Allow potstickers to steam, undisturbed, for an additional 3 minutes.

Remove lid and remove potstickers to a serving plate. Deglaze the pan with water and repeat the cooking process for the remaining potstickers.

Serve potstickers immediately, garnished with chopped chives and served with dipping sauce if desired.

For the Dipping Sauce
3 T soy sauce
1/4 tsp red pepper flakes
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1/4 tsp ground ginger

Combine ingredients in a small dish. Stir well. Dip potstickers very lightly into the sauce, a little goes a long way!

And now, for something thoroughly NOT wedding cake:

Meatballs!

After spending the majority of last week baking more cake than many people bake in a lifetime, I’m celebrating this week by not baking anything sweet. No cookies, no cakes, no pies, nothin’. Instead, MEATBALLS.

These particular meatballs are a blend, primarily, of ground beef and ground pork. You can really mix and match any ground meats you like, or you can just use one variety. I’ve made excellent batches using only ground turkey, but beef and pork were in the freezer, so there you are. But contrary to their name, meatballs are not entirely meat. I daresay that every recipe I’ve seen suggests that bread crumbs are just as important as the meat itself.

Let’s actually talk about bread crumbs for a moment. Bread crumbs are incredibly easy to produce (if you have bread, you can make bread crumbs), but they have still managed to find their way onto the shelves of grocery stores in a consistency that often is not so much of crumbs as it is a fine dust. If you have fresh bread, a few minutes in the oven will crisp it enough that you can smash it into crumbs at whatever consistency you fancy. Or, if you have trouble making it through a baguette before it goes stale, as I always seem to do, you can grind that sucker up in the food processor for bread crumbs far more satisfying and probably more economical than the canisters at the store.

In addition to the bread crumbs, we’ll add some eggs, some parmesan cheese, and some seasoning to make our meatballs awesome.

Now you can really mix this up however you like, but as I stressed when making beef jerky some months ago, digging in with your hands is really the most effective means of mixing this quickly and well. You might as well, because you’re going to get your hands all meaty anyway to fashion the mixture into balls.

At the risk of prompting innuendo: you can make your meatballs whatever size you like. I tend to make lots of smaller, bite-size meatballs, while others may prefer fewer, larger ones. I find the smaller size easier to cook, as they more quickly cook all the way through by the time a brown crust has been achieved in the frying pan.

I’ve heard that you can bake meatballs as well, but as I mentioned, we’re not baking anything. Plus, the brown, pan-fried crust is one of the features of meatballs I find so appealing. So pan-frying it is!

Once they are done, these meatballs can be served in a variety of ways. You can eat them just as they are, stab them with a fork and dip them in ranch dressing, smother them with brown gravy Ikea-style, or my favorite, heaped atop a mound of spaghetti and tomato sauce.

Sheer, savory, not-anything-like-wedding-cake bliss.

Classic Meatballs
Adapted from Sarah W.

A Note on Yield: This recipe makes about 80 one-inch meatballs I like to cook about half of them (which will comfortably feed 4-6 people when served over pasta) and then freeze the remainder for another day. To freeze, line a cookie sheet with parchment paper and freeze the meatballs so they are not touching one another. Once they are solid (it takes about 2 hours), you can bag them up for storage.

1 lb ground beef
1 lb ground pork
4 eggs, beaten
1 1/2 c bread crumbs
1/2 c parmesan cheese
1 1/2 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp black pepper
3/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp oregano
2-3 T olive oil

In a large, wide bowl, combine all ingredients except for oil and mix well, using your fingers or a fork. Working with small sections of the meat mixture, roll each section between your palms to create a ball about 1″ in diameter. Continue until the entire mixture has been rolled into balls.

Heat oil in a large frying pan over medium heat until oil glistens and pan is hot. Add meatballs to pan to form a single layer, allowing a bit of space between the meatballs. Turn meatballs as the bottom side begins to brown, allowing a crisp exterior to form on as much of the meatball as possible, and until meatballs are cooked through. Remove meatballs to a plate lined with paper towels to soak up excess grease.

If serving meatballs over spaghetti, bring a pot of water to a boil while you are heating the oil in the frying pan. Add pasta and cook to al denté, usually about 7-8 minutes. Heat your favorite pasta sauce in a separate pan.

You can add the meatballs directly to the pasta sauce if you wish, but I prefer to place them on top of each plate of pasta & sauce. Garnish with parmesan cheese if desired.