Pulled Pork Sandwiches and a Failed Attempt at Fried Pickles

The homemade kaiser rolls took a long time, but if you used store bought rolls, this is something you could put in the crock pot in the morning and have ready for dinner. The pork was fall apart tender, and Puddleglum and all the boys kept sampling the pork while I got everything ready.

There are probably a ton of recipes on the internet. I rubbed a pork should blade roast with brown sugar, paprika, onion powder, sea salt, and fresh ground

pepper. I put onion slices, carrots, and celery on the bottom of a crock pot, and put the roast (fat side up) on the vegetables.

You can roast all day on low. After you take your finished roast out, save and freeze the juice in the crock pot for soup stock. We put pan drippings in freezer bags and freeze them flat for easy thawing.

I wanted to give kudos to my friend, Christina. A few years ago she gave me the recipe for roasting a chicken in a crock pot with forty cloves of garlic, and that got me used to roasting meat in a crock pot. We've made that recipe so many times, and it is good every time. The drippings from that recipe make the best soup stock.

The kaiser rolls were tricky. I enjoyed making these, and I felt like it was worth it. If you want to try making these, click HERE to go to an excellent website with instructions and pictures. Instead of poppy seeds, I used sesame seeds since we always have a bunch of those (the boys like rice with soy sauce and sesame oil with sesame seeds sprinkled in). For my oven, the temperature in the instructions was a little high. If you are wondering what those yellow discs are, they are a pickled radish called oshingo. I tried making fried pickles with them (in addition to dill pickles), and it was a complete disaster.

I made carrot salad with asian apple pear, pineapples, and dried cranberries. It sounds good, and it was good, but truthfully I didn't feel it was a ton better than the kind of carrot salad that everyone's mom makes with plain old raisins and apples. I asked Puddleglum to pick up some of the good dill pickles in the refrigerated section, and he brought back those long flat sandwich sliced pickles. This was great for the sandwiches, but I actually wanted to make fried pickles. I did try cutting some of the sandwich slices and frying them, but it didn't turn out right. Several people commented about missing fried pickles. If I ever perfect a recipe that tastes like what I remember from Pass the Biscuits, I'll post it. If anyone tries a recipe that is close, please let me know. These were edible, and the batter might have been right, but because they were cut from sandwich slices, they weren't the right texture.

I made homemade barbecue sauce using a recipe from Emeril. It is from this WEBPAGE where he makes pulled pork sandwiches with cole slaw and fried pickles. I didn't use his fried pickle recipe because he fried them whole. I think sliced pickle slices have to work better. Anyway, the barbecue sauce turned out really well. We happened to use the very last bit of ketchup for the recipe, so when I finished mixing it, I just poured it back into the ketchup container so we could just squeeze it onto our sandwiches. We were out of apple cider vinegar, so I used 1/2 a cup of white vinegar and 1/2 a cup of peach flavored grape juice (I know, but this is actually a good substitution). I know it doesn't sound very culinary, but neither do fried pickles. I also didn't have dried crushed red pepper, so I used cayenne pepper instead. It was darn good barbecue sauce.

Emeril's Barbecue Sauce

• 1 cup apple cider vinegar
• 1 cup ketchup
• 3 tablespoons packed dark brown sugar
• 1 tablespoon yellow mustard
• 1 tablespoon molasses
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon dried crushed red pepper

In a bowl, combine all the ingredients and whisk well to dissolve the sugar. Place in a squeeze bottle and dress the pulled pork sandwiches to taste. This recipe is great as a condiment, but for baking or grilling, it is too bland. Add some Worcestershire, onion powder, soy sauce, honey or whatever to taste.