Recently I have felt like I’ve hit a wall. I needed to mix up my meals a little bit more than normal. I was not sure if I could have another piece of chicken for dinner again. This weekend I was happy that we prepared steak for dinner on Saturday. On Sunday we had another meal that was a little out of our wheel house…. pulled pork!

While at Wegmans on Saturday we picked up a two pound pork shoulder and some Stubb’s BBQ sauce. (I love this sauce because compared to most it was low in sodium and sugar – we like the flavor a lot too!)

On Sunday afternoon I got our ingredients together. I mixed the BBQ sauce with some hot sauce, apple cider vinegar and water:

We put the pork shoulder in the crock pot, poured our sauce in and turned on the crock pot – the pork cooked on high for five hours. Let me pause and tell you how much I love the crock pot. While the pork was cooking I got on the treadmill for almost an hour (50 minutes to be exact). I should have done more (I went through the entire weekend without doing a single load of laundry – I also have a few unread New Yorkers. I really need to catch up!) but I was satisfied with the exercise.

After exercise and a shower, I figured I should start on my non mayonnaise coleslaw. I had picked up a green cabbage and a purple cabbage. Instead of using my food processor I just sliced the cabbage with my knife.

For the other vegetables, I used a red pepper, a big carrot and a few scallions. For a dressing I used garlic powder, salt, pepper, sherry vinegar and olive oil. I was basing my slaw off of Mark Bittman’s amazing coleslaw: Spicy No – Mayo Slaw.

The slaw is so beautiful as it comes together:

I like dressing the slaw a couple of hours before I serve it. Because everything is so fresh (and crunchy!) the vinegar helps break down the cabbage just a little bit – which helps the whole dish come together.

The pork was cooking and our kitchen smelled great. With an hour left SC used a spoon and broke up the shoulder so it was submerged into our sauce. (I had added more bbq sauce, vinegar and water about three hours into the cooking process):

By 8pm I was so ready for dinner. We shredded the pork and put it back in the crock pot, stirring it all together with the sauce. Ideally, I would have liked the pork to cook for another hour to really absorb the sauce and flavor – but I couldn’t wait that long. It was still an amazing dinner!! It paired perfectly with the slaw and the cornbread we had!