Gone To The Beach: 04.23.2012

Monday, April 23, 2012

Rainy Day Pulled Pork

Hi! Oh I was bummed out!

We haven't had any rain in maybe six months, but oh sure, the flea market begins and it just has to POUR on Sunday. Hard to believe last week was almost too hot to shop at the market and we BBQed on a warm sunny deck that evening. Today, grey, grey, big blobs, rain. And floods...the beach is under a flood watch because of the rain and new moon high tides.

An indoor day. Earth Day! Lucky for me I have my Weather Bug thing and knew the rain was coming. A friend borrowed my Jeep to get to his job, so I was definitely stuck at home.

A good quilting day! So I wanted an easy meal for Sunday dinner: Crockpot Pulled Pork.

Last time we made Pulled Pork (what my mom would have called pork BBQ) it tasted great but the sauce was much too wet and runny. Nice pork roasts at the Italian market, really a very economical meat...I slow-cooked the pork overnight, with just a few seasonings---salt, pepper, dried onion, garlic.

The next day, at your convenience, you take the meat out of the cooker, drain it really well and PULL it apart with a couple forks. Easy peasy.

A friend brought me Vermont BBQ sauce. So much easier than making yucky homemade! Lovely thick, smoky and rich!order here

See, they have a website! http://www.vermontcountrystore.com/

Hope I can order more. For a 3 pound pork roast, shredded, I used 3/4 of this jar, saving some to drizzle on top when serving.

I returned it to the slow cooker, on low, for 2 hours at 4 PM, dinner for the kids at 6.

I also made a huge bowl of coleslaw---to me, pork BBQ just requires classic coleslaw. Again, simple, fast shortcuts...a bag of pre-shredded slaw, plus shredded carrots and red cabbage. (The rest of the veg will be a ginger beef salad during the week.)

Used Marie's lo-fat bottled yogurt slaw dressing, just added a little lemon and celery seed. Usually I'd make my own slaw, all from scratch but this was to be an easy prep day so I could sew.

Yummy! And everyone was happy and cozy on this rainy day, always makes a mom's heart all warm and fuzzy, right?

As for the quilting:

I finished piecing the teeny tiny adorable quilt from Cheri's blog. I think the entire quilt is maybe 14" square. earlier post here

I love it! I paper pieced the sawtooth borders, and wished I'd paper pieced the tiny stars too.

...even though Cheri kindly assured me that primitive was the right look! I am telling myself only I can see those crooked stars [so don't mention them, please..shhh!].

It will have this large scale print on the back. Handquilting this summer, on the beach, of course.

I teadyed my red background fabric for my other little quilt from Cherie's blog. here I was pretty upset last week...I know I have the perfect red fabric, it's what I pictured---can only find the fabric in black, in my stash. So I had to dye a sub.

Then, for most of the day I worked on this folky Ships-and-Stars quilt. It's like a puzzle, fitting together all these antique and vintage blocks! I made nice progress though. Finally! And got smart and left myself little notes for making the rows the right size. I call them "shims" (my son has a new DIY book, I was reading up on installing beadboard wainscoting...): tiny strips...or large pretty pieced strips, or sashes, whatever is needed to fix the horizontal width.

I hope it's a success! I've been collecting the antique blocks and planning this for maybe 10 years! And of course I have way too many blocks, so now I'll have to think of a new plan for them.