Dinner Party

This past Wednesday I hosted a birthday party for the mother-in-law! It was my first ever dinner party in the new apartment! The menu was super easy and there were just 5 of us, so it was no big deal, but I feel like I accomplished something and will be more likely to host more get togethers now that I have successfully completed the first one!!

For an appetizer I used my mom's red pepper jelly over cream cheese - can't give you the recipe for that.. but it's always a hit!

I made a salad with inspiration from an appetizer in this post. As cute as the watermelon, tomato and basil toothpick appetizers are, it takes a bit of time! So instead  I just put everything in a bowl and voila - "salad"!

Excited to use my new Wilton Armetale bowl too!

For main dish I tried a new pulled pork crock pot recipe! My previous go to pulled pork dish was just toss a pork loin in a crock pot and cook it for 6 hours and shred and add your fav bbq sauce. Obviously that is super easy and works well - I just wanted to try something with a few more ingredients = "fancier"! I searched a bunch of crock pot recipes and ended up with a variation on this one.

Sorry it's such a bad quality picture!

Ingredients:
4 lb pork roast (shoulder or butt)
1 large sweet onion
1 1/2 cups ginger ale (regular, not diet!)
1 bottle favorite bbq sauce - I went with local favorite Montgomery Inn
bbq rub
8+ potato buns (you could use whatever kind you wanted, but I find this style to be extra light and fluffy and yummy.. I used "Private Selection Country Potato Buns")

Directions:
Ideally, you should trim fat off roast and sprinkle roast with bbq rub the night before. I was lazy and waited until the morning.. so yeah. I used Famous Daves Rib Rub.

The onion I found was rather large and that made me nervous so I probably used 2/3 of a big onion? Chop that up into smaller piece (not really super fine, just small-ish) and layer bottom of crock pot.

Add roast on top of onions.

Pour the ginger ale over the roast.

Cook on low for at least 9 hours (yes, 9 hours! The original recipe suggests cooking it for 12 hours... but I was not wanting to make this the day before.. 9 hours worked just fine). I know you aren't supposed to touch anything when it's cooking, but I'm a curious cat and couldn't resist so I rearranged and stirred and flipped the roast probably twice.. After the 9 hours, remove roast and shred using 2 forks. Drain liquid, but keep onions.

After roast is shredded put pork and onions back in crock pot and stir in bbq sauce. The amount of sauce you use is totally to taste! The original recipe suggested 1 18 ounce bottle. The bottle I had on hand was 28 ounces and I used almost all of it to get it looking the way I wanted (surprisingly, it really wasn't all that extra saucy though).

After stirring in sauce, cook on low for at least an hour. The original recipe suggests 4-6 hours, but again who has that time! I ended up cooking it for close to 2 hours. I read some of the comments on the recipe and some reviewers suggested stirring it to make sure it wasn't burning - I probably stirred 3-4 times within the 2 hours, but more because I like to stir - nothing looked like it was burning! Serve on bun!

That's it! I was surprised that it didn't taste onion-y to me. I think the flavor just blended in well and worked great! So far there has been enough for 8 sandwiches but I still have left overs! You could definitely freeze some pork too - I would take some out before you add the sauce though!

Have you made any new recipes recently?