It isn't easy cooking for one or two people. After a while you get tired of the quickly broiled or sauteed steak, chop or piece of chicken. You long for a slow cooked, succulent pork roast or something like that.
Well if you plan ahead, you can have that delicious roast pork and then do all sorts of wonderful things with the leftovers, making it a good way to get several meals from one piece of meat, without tiring of the original dish.
Today I cooked a delicious Boston butt pork roast. It weighed about 6.5 pounds. I rubbed it with some herbs, put it in my roaster, added two cups of water and let it slowly roast at 350 for 5-6 hours. The first three hours I cooked it covered, then removed the lid the last 2-3 hours. I roasted it until it was so tender that if you tried to pick it up with two forks, the meat tore to shreds. It had a nice dark brown crust and the water in the bottom of the pan simmered away, leaving a nice brown fond. I carefully removed the roast from the pan to a serving platter, covered it and allowed it to sit while making gravy. I poured the rendered fat out of the pan, added a can chicken broth to the pan and stirred it until the fond was dissolved. Meanwhile in another pan, I heated 2 tbsp. of oil and added 2 tbsp. flour. I cooked that into a light brown roux, then added the broth from the roasting pan, stirring rapidly with a whisk until a nice gravy resulted. I allowed that to simmer a couple of minutes the put into a serving boat. The meat was so tender that you couldn't really slice it, so tore it into serving sized chunks. We ate the roast pork and gravy with mashed potatoes and some steamed vegetables. MMMMM
When finished eating, I tore the remaining pork off the bone, trimmed off any fat and divided it between two different containers. One will be used for making pork burritos one evening this week. The other container will be cooked with a good bbq sauce and used for pulled pork sandwiches. I'm already looking forward to this week's dinners!
