Dumb Easy Dinner: Savory Crock Pot Pork Roast

It might be almost April (I may even have some spinach sprouting up in my garden), but I'm not ready to ditch the comfort foods quite yet. I mean, it might get cold at night. Are spinach smoothies going to help me with that? I think not. 

Which is why all of us still need a few good roast recipes in our back pockets. This is a very good recipe. Sometimes crock pot recipes come out a little more bland than their roasted counterparts, but this was packed with flavor and very tender. And I don't know about you, but I always appreciate a good dump-in-and-leave-it crock pot recipe. Five minute assembly, check.

Savory Crock Pot Pork Roast
adapted from Poor Amy
feeds 6-8 people unless you're big teenager man people, then maybe less
prep time: 5 minutes
Cook time: 6 hours in crock pot
Cost: $8.10 (this is $1-2/per meal for fantastic, top-notch food)
pork: $8, dry onion soup: .70, beef stock: .20, soy sauce: .10, other stuff: .10

Note: I did use the dry onion soup packet, which felt like cheating, but I tried not to feel too sorry since I did just make my family a fantabulous meal of meat and potatoes for freaking out's sake. However, if making food not from complete scratch is offensive to you, then use some good quality beef broth with an onion sliced into it instead of the dry onion soup/water in this recipe.

1 pork roast (mine was about 4 pounds)
1 (1-ounce) envelope dry onion soup
1 C water
3/4 C beef stock
3 Tbsp soy sauce
black pepper
1-2 Tbsp minced garlic

Dump that roast in the crock. Put the dry onion soup on top, then pour on water, beef stock, and soy sauce (pour this over the top so it mixes with the onion soup). Kind of mix everything together with a spoon. Top meat with black pepper and minced garlic.

Cook on high for 6-ish hours.

PRINTABLE RECIPE

Dumb Easy Dinner: Barbecups

I don't know how you could possibly not make a dinner with a name as cute as Barbecups. I mean, come on, it's adorable.

 Also, these are very easy. I should warn you, however, that these are not a perfect whole food. You're going to be using some biscuits or croissants out of a can. If that bothers you feel free to make a batch of your own little biscuit dough from scratch. Just know that that will make these a little less dumb easy.

I should also warn you that these don't involve a vegetable (unless you count BBQ sauce as a vegetable, which you probably shouldn't, but I won't judge you if you do). To rectify that you can just use a bagged salad or--my husband's favorite option--open up a can of corn. I know that sounds super lame, but it will totally work and be delicious. You could also add olives to these if olives are your thing.

Barbecups
makes 12 (can make more if they're tiny)
Prep time: 10 minutes
Cook time: 30 minutes if you cook the chicken
Cost: $4.75
croissants: 2.00, chicken: 2.00, cheese: .50, bbq: .25

Note: If you want to make this incredibly fast, you can use canned chicken (that's been drained). I'm not going to lie--it's not as good. But it's very fast.

Note: You can used browned beef in place of the chicken. You'll probably need about 1/2 pound.

2 packages croissant dough (you know, the one in the tubes); you could also use biscuit dough
2 breasts shredded chicken (if you're chicken breasts are huge, you only need one)
3/4 C barbeque sauce
1 C shredded cheddar cheese

If you need to, cook your chicken breasts.

While your chicken breasts are cooking, open your croissants and lay them out as rectangles. Cut squares big enough to fit into the muffin portion of a muffin tin. Press them into the muffin tins.

When the chicken is cooked, shred it. A quick way to do this is to put them in your Kitchenaid if you have one--use the paddle mixer and it will shred that warm chicken breast.

Add barbeque sauce to your chicken breasts.

Put a spoonful of chicken/BBQ into each muffin tin. Top with cheese. That's it. Bake it according to the package instructions. And add some veggies to the side if you're feeling righteous.

PRINTABLE RECIPE

Secret Recipe Club--Peanut Butter Pretzel Truffles

This month I had Oh! You Cook for Secret Recipe Club. I wasn't planning to make a dessert. I was intrigued by several posts Dena had about artists favorite foods--like this Georgia O'Keefe watercress soup. And I'd even purchased leeks to make a nice healthy potato leek soup (Claude Monet, in case you were wondering). And then evilness happened. Or, well, the weekend when I was all set to make my nice healthy soup, I didn't want nice healthy soup. I wanted, well, the truth is that I wanted cookies. So I went back to Dena's blog to scour around for cookies and I found this.

They weren't quite cookies, but I was pretty sure they would hit the spot and then some. Also, I had a half-used bag of pretzels languishing in my pantry. I felt it was my duty to use them up--food waste being a sin and all. So I made these and they were utterly fantastic and you should make them too.

Additionally, they're easy to do and with Easter coming they could easily be shaped into little darling eggs. Some of mine came out pretty egg-shaped without even trying. But we didn't wait till Easter to eat them.

Peanut Butter Pretzel Truffles
adapted from Oh! You Cook
Prep time: 5 minutes
Cook time: 30 minutes
Cost: $2.10
pretzels: .30, peanut butter: .50, chocolate chips: 1.00, sugars: .25, butter: .05

1 1/4 C pretzels
1/2 C creamy peanut butter
1 Tbl. unsalted butter, room temperature
2 Tbl. brown sugar
3 Tbl. confectioners' (powdered) sugar
1-2 cups semisweet chocolate chips

Put your pretzels in a large Ziploc bag, then roll them with a rolling pin. My kids thought this was awesome. You'll have 1/3-1/2 C crushed pretzels--you want them crushed to small pieces, but not to powder (thus you might want to avoid the food processor this time). Set these aside.

In a small bowl, mix peanut butter, butter, brown sugar and confectioners' sugar, stirring until blended and as smooth as possible. 

Reserve 1 Tbsp of the crushed pretzels. Then add the rest to the peanut butter mixture and mix.

Roll these into balls. I put my dough into the freezer for 20 minutes or so, so they were easier to roll. 

After they're rolled, melt your chocolate. I did this in the microwave in 20 second intervals. When it's melted, you can either dip the peanut butter pretzel balls in, but that sounded hard and messy to me and I'm shamelessly lazy. So I put my balls on parchment paper and simply plopped chocolate onto them. This meant their bottoms didn't get covered, but we didn't mind (although having a fully covered chocolate give you that satisfying crack of the chocolate shell when you bite into them...)

Then sprinkle with remaining pretzel crumbles.

Allow chocolate to harden. We did this in the freezer for about 20 more minutes. You can also do the fridge, or--if you have the patience of Job--just leave them on the counter for several hours. 

PRINTABLE RECIPE

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