Slow Cooker Pork Posole
It's been a long week and I'm pretty tired today, so I wanted to prioritize giving my body a break. On top of that, I had a cold last week, and have been craving serious spice. The cold is gone, but the craving remains. Enter: the slow cooker and this new-to-me recipe for posole from All Recipes.
Planning!
I had a couple of thoughts when planning this dish.
Firstly, it's too much food. I decided to cut the weight of the meat, and rather than try to find a 2lb pork shoulder (not likely), go with pork tenderloin, which I know shreds up beautifully after taking a long bath in the slow cooker.
I also wanted to do this recipe overnight. I hedged my bets that I'd get out of work yesterday in time to get my grocery shopping done before the store closed, and planned accordingly. If I could make it happen, I would be done with a dish before the day off really truly even began. And the cherry on top of that sundae would be that I would have an extra day to ripen an avocado to top the posole. The avocados at my grocery store are generally pretty young, and almost always need a generous amount of time in a paper bag to ripen up.
It all worked out!
Here's the nutritional breakdown from Fitbit...
Groceries I had on hand...
- pasilla chiles
- ancho chiles
- guajilla chiles
- cumin seeds
- garlic
- onion
- bay leaves
- salt
- radishes
Groceries I had to buy...
- roma tomatoes (1.57lb @ $1.49/lb = $2.34)
- pork tenderloin (2.25lb @ $3.99/lb = $8.98)
- white hominy ($1.89)
- avocado ($1.99)
Total monies spent for the entire recipe: $15.20
Total monies spent for each of these 4 meals....
$3.80 per meal...
Cooking!
Though the beauty of the slow cooker is that it is super hands-off, I was most attracted to this recipe for the chile and tomato sauce you make on the stovetop before setting the whole slow cooker situation rolling. I did manage to streamline the sauce, so it was no big deal and took barely any time: I was able to skip the "wait to cool this down" step by using my immersion blender (rather than a blender with a lid) and then getting moving to the full cook. Similarly, once I returned the shredded pork to the slow cooker and mixed it all up with the sauce again, I just dropped the rinsed hominy into the slow cooker and put it up to high for 45 minutes to meld the flavors together. Why dirty a pot when you've already got the slow cooker on?
Meanwhile, in addition to the planned-avocado, I also took advantage of having some extra radishes from my salmon and salad lunches this week, and I quick-pickled some radishes overnight as a second garnish. Waste not, after all!
I took a little taste of the posole as it went into the tupperwares.... This is going to be SUCH a good week.
