Recipe: North Carolina Pork Barbecue

Serve with 24 Hour Slaw with Hot Dressing

NORTH CAROLINA PORK BARBECUE

Makes about 8 big sandwiches

4-5 lb pork shoulder roast or Boston butt

1 C white vinegar

½ C water

2 Tbsp sugar

½ tsp salt

½ tsp crushed red pepper

¼ tsp black pepper

8 kaiser rolls, split and toasted if desired (preferably homemade—see recipes for French Bread in Baked Goods section)

Place roast in bottom of (at least a 4 quart) slow cooker, and add remaining ingredients except rolls. Cover and cook on low heat setting for 10-12 hours, or on high heat setting for 5-6 hours. Remove meat from cooker and cool slightly. Remove meat from bone, and shred or chop meat. Stir in as much of the cooking liquid as desired to moisten meat and serve on rolls.

Stew

Not soup so not an contest entrant.

Santa Fe Beef Stew in the Slow Cooker.

Shhhh. I didn't let on to Mr Big Food but I messed up-- it's a complicated fancy slow cooker with a bunch of digital gadgets and lights and 0.7 timers and all. The cooker was prepared before he and Miss M ventured into the Real World today at about 7. All I had to do was to set the crockpot for 11 hours on low and turn the stupid thing on at 8.

It took me until 8:40 to figure out that I had been out smarted by a slow cooker.

At 8, I set it for 11 hours, but failed to turn the stupid thing on.

At the 11 hour mark-- that would be 7pm-- I was to increase the power level to "high" and insert some veggies.

I did some adjustments. I was 40 minutes late in turning the stupid thing on but the more I thought about it, the less important those 40 minutes were.

At 7:20 I powered it up to "high" and threw in the zucchini.

No one noticed. And that-- Hey Aggie!- is the joy of slow cooking.

Recipe: Rump Roast and Vegetables (in the Crock Pot)

In a Crock Pot (I can say that b/c it was cooked in a Crock Pot, not a crock pot)

Mr. Big Food used a chuck roast rather than a rump roast. 

RUMP ROAST AND VEGETABLES

Serves 6

2-2 ½ lb boneless beef pot roast, cut to fit slow cooker if necessary (round rump, round tip, or chuck roast is especially good in this)

2 Tbsp oil

1 ½ lbs small potatoes (about 10) or medium potatoes (about 4), halved or quartered

2 medium carrots, peeled and cut into ½ inch slices (about 1 C)

1 small onion, sliced

10 oz package frozen lima beans

1 bay leaf

2 Tbsp quick-cooking tapioca

10 ¾ oz can condensed vegetable beef soup

¼ C water

¼ tsp pepper

Click for prep instructions

Slow Food

Chuck Roast and Vegetables in Slow Cooker

Just as we have coke/Coke, kleenex/Kleenex and bush hog/Bush Hog, so, too, we have crock pot/Crock-Pot. According to that infallible source, Wikipedia, the slow cooker was first introduced by Naxon Utilities Corporation of Chicago as the Naxon Beanery All-Purpose Cooker. "The Rival Company bought Naxon in 1970 and reintroduced it under the Crock-Pot name in 1971. 

Youngsters may not know this, but Crock Pots did not originally have removable crocks, and they certainly were not immersible. Talk about hard to clean! Rival introduced removable crocks in 1974.

Some crappy old homemaker stuff. Top-Bottom, Left-Right: potato masher (wooden thing), bread box (shiny thing), iron, Crock Pot with non-removable crock, oven thermometer. (There's also a new Sunbeam egg timer but it doesn't work.)

It doesn't take much to amuse me on rainy Thursday morning. Here's what I've uncovered about Mr. Naxon, inventor of the slow cooker. 

My Dad, Irving Naxon, invented the crock pot, the then-called Naxon Beanery. He retired in 1971 and sold his business to Rival Manufacturing. They streamlined the design, renamed it the crock pot, and the rest is American culinary history. But what was his inspiration for its creation in the first place, you might ask?


My grandmother Tamara Kaslovski Nachumsohn, grew up in a small “shtetl” in Lithuania. She told my dad, when he was a young child, that when she was growing up back in the old country, each Friday afternoon her mother would send her to the local bakery with their pot of prepared but yet uncooked “cholent.” There it would be put into the oven for a full day, while the family observed the Sabbath and the hot oven cooled to warm while not in use for that same period. At sundown she would go to the bakery and bring the family their delicious pot of steamy stew.

Dad remembered the story and was inspired to find a way to create a heating element that surrounded the pot in the same way that an oven would have. He wanted to find a low cost, low electricity use solution. I remember our having a Beanery at home during the 1950′s and 1960′s. We used it to “boik” potatoes, roast corn, make delicious stews and soups. Mom used to put old fashioned oatmeal in it before we went to bed and we woke up to a steaming pot of hot cereal.

 What a nice story. 

The history of the Bean Pot at the Rival Company is interesting on a rainy Thursday, too. 

Miller [Rival President at the time] said the Bean Pot was almost an afterthought during the negotiations. "No one paid any attention to it," he told the Kansas City Times. "We almost forgot about it."

After the acquisition, Miller asked Rival's home economist to experiment with the product. She developed an entire recipe book of dishes, with and without beans, that could be used to produce gourmet meals. The cooker's casing was redesigned to give it a dressy look, and it was renamed the Crock Pot. The Crock Pot made its debut at the National Housewares Show in Chicago in 1971, and it retailed for about $25.00. 

Sales skyrocketed in the first few years. The Crock Pot posted sales of $2 million in its first year, leaping to $10 million in 1972, doubling to $23 million in the next year, totaling $57 million in 1974, and topping at $93 million in 1975. Like any buying craze that takes over the country, sellouts were common at retail stores. One retailer planned a major promotion of the Crock Pot, but canceled all advertising after its employees bought every Crock Pot prior to the store's opening.

The "Crock Pot" brand now belongs to Sunbeam Products, a subsidiary of Jarden Corporation."

Jarden Corporation, is a provider of a diverse range of consumer products with a portfolio of over 100 brands sold globally, operating in three primary business segments - Outdoor Solutions, Consumer Solutions and Branded Consumables. In 2012, Jarden was ranked #371 on the Fortune 500. On December 31, 2011, Jarden's market capitalization was approximately US $2.7 billion and the company had over 23,000 employees worldwide^{[citation needed]}.

 By the way, the Wikipedia entry on Jarden "appears to be written like an advertisement." 

Jarden doesn't actually produce anything. It acquires companies that produce things.

Recipe: Barbeque Style Chicken Wings

Mr. Big Food's contribution to Chiggerfest!

BARBECUE STYLE CHICKEN WINGS

About 32 wing portions

3 lbs chicken wings, disjointed, wing tips discarded

2 C good barbecue sauce (use one of the recipes in the Barbecue Sauces subsection)

Preheat broiler. Place chicken pieces on unheated rack of broiler pan, and broil 4-5 inches from heat source for 10 minutes or until browned, turning once. Transfer wings to a 3 ½ or 4 quart slow cooker. Pour sauce over chicken wings, cover, and cook on low heat setting for 4-5 hour, or on high heat setting for 2-2 ½ hours.

Recipe: Country Swiss Steak in Slow Cooker

Danged good food

The slow cooker-- also know as the "crockpot"-- is an under appreciated piece of cooking equipment these days. I would like to see a return to a crockpot way of life. Crockpots simmer the best of the past with the best of the present. Presently, most folks don't have time to cook. (Which is not true, but I'll set that aside.) We ate better in the past-- less fast food, less processed food, more good home cookin'. Crockpot cooking affords the opportunity to eat better while spending little time cooking. 

Here's how it work. You do have to decide on a crockpot recipe, and you do have to have the necessary ingredients, and with some-- but not all-- crockpot recipes you do have to do minimal prep cooking. For example, this morning while the coffee was peculating, Mr. Big Food fried the sausages and browned the Swiss steak. And then you do have to put it all in the crockpot. And you do have to turn it on. But that's it! (That's a lie. Mr. Big Food did have to make some rice this evening.) And then you get home and supper is waiting for you! Easy clean up, too. 

Recipe below.