{"id":474,"date":"2015-07-29T08:05:32","date_gmt":"2015-07-29T12:05:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/joeywrites.com\/?p=474"},"modified":"2015-07-29T10:17:01","modified_gmt":"2015-07-29T14:17:01","slug":"joey-cooks-boston-butt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/joeywrites.com\/?p=474","title":{"rendered":"Joey Cooks: Boston Butt"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Welcome to <strong>Joey Cooks! <\/strong> In this new segment of my blog, I&#8217;ll be writing about some of my cooking (mis)adventures.  Shorty Hulk calls me a &#8220;scratch cook&#8221; &#8211; basically, I tend to look through the cupboards, look through my recipes, look through the dark and dusky corners of my scattered mind (which is scary, trust me) and then I wing it.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not a master chef, nor have I studied at Johnson &#038; Wales.  In fact, when I got my first apartment I found myself constantly calling my mom in a panic &#8211; and when she wasn&#8217;t home, I called her neighbor. (Thank you, Mrs. Westgate!)  I&#8217;ve also watched way too many hours of the Food Network and other cooking shows over the years.  And I&#8217;m very thankful to all my friends and family members who let me &#8220;experiment&#8221; on the strength of their gastric systems and palates.<\/p>\n<p>Whether the results are great or not so great, I&#8217;ll let you know.  Mostly, I&#8217;m trying to stop all the fast food and take out from being the default dinner ideas in our home.  I also try to eat gluten-free due to Celiac&#8217;s disease, so I&#8217;m always looking for yummy things that will keep me from straying from the GF path.<br \/>\n<\/em><br \/>\nSo &#8211; this week I&#8217;m going to start things off with an easy-as-pork recipe that I tried last night.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boston Butt (Pork Shoulder) in a Crockpot<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/joeywrites.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/Boston-Butt.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/joeywrites.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/Boston-Butt-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"Boston Butt\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-475\" srcset=\"https:\/\/joeywrites.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/Boston-Butt-225x300.jpg 225w, https:\/\/joeywrites.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/Boston-Butt.jpg 720w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 225px) 100vw, 225px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I purchased a 7 lb. Boston Butt (aka Pork Shoulder) from Harris Teeter because it was on sale.  After a quick google I came across <a href=\"http:\/\/addapinch.com\/cooking\/pork-roast-recipe\/\" target=\"_blank\">this blog recipe<\/a> for cooking it in a crock pot. And no, I don&#8217;t know why the shoulder of the pig is called the Boston Butt. But since I&#8217;m from New England, I like calling it Boston Butt &#8211; it feels more like home. <\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t have a fancy crock pot &#8211; I have an 1980s Rival model (similar to the one pictured here) that was given to me by the mother of an ex-boyfriend.<a href=\"https:\/\/joeywrites.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/Old-Crock-Pot-e1383428309661.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/joeywrites.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/Old-Crock-Pot-e1383428309661-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"Old-Crock-Pot-e1383428309661\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" class=\"alignright size-thumbnail wp-image-476\" \/><\/a>  So as you can see, it has 3 settings:  Off, Low, and High. <\/p>\n<p>If you don&#8217;t know (I didn&#8217;t) &#8211; Boston Butt has a big bone in the center of it.  You don&#8217;t have to remove it for this process, you can just leave it right where it is.  <\/p>\n<p>Also, mine had a big layer of fat along one side.  I decided to plunk the whole thing in my crockpot fat side up so all the juices could drip down. The Worcestershire sauce I used was the Harris Teeter brand, and since my cut of meat was bigger than the recipe, I was very liberal with my &#8220;dashes&#8221;.  I then used a jar of roast rub that I had recently bought (I had a coupon!) and covered the fat layer with it, making sure to coat the top very liberally.  I then put a few more dashes of Worcestershire on top of that. I also peeled and cut up 2 cloves of garlic and tucked them down either side of the meat for good measure.<br \/>\n(even though I washed my hands well before and after this process, I had dreams of yummy garlic dishes while I slept that night.)<\/p>\n<p>I put everything together around midnight (while watching an old black and white movie featuring Dean Jones, Connie Stevens and Cesar Romero &#8211; &#8220;Guillotine for Two&#8221;), set the crock pot on low as instructed and then went to bed (garlic dreams, yada yada). <\/p>\n<p>When I woke up the next morning &#8211; the meat was pretty done and there was a good layer of juice in the crock pot. I kept it on low and headed off to work &#8211; I didn&#8217;t turn the meat or anything.  I didn&#8217;t get a chance to check the meat again until about 5:30, so by that time the meat had cooked and then &#8220;steamed&#8221; for about 18 hours. The entire piece of meat was so tender and moist it literally slid right off the large bone when I lifted it with a fork.  I pulled the bone out and threw that away. <\/p>\n<p>To serve it for dinner, I microwaved a pack of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.traderjoes.com\/digin\/post\/guide-to-TJs-rice\" target=\"_blank\">Trader Joe&#8217;s Jasmine rice <\/a> and split it between 2 bowls.  I used a fork to grab several hunks of meat and place it on top, then spooned the steamed juices over everything.  Shorty Hulk and I both had 2 servings of meat and it was great. I didn&#8217;t add any salt or pepper, the rub and Worcestershire was enough for me.  Your miles may vary. <\/p>\n<p>I stored the leftovers with juice in the fridge overnight, and Shorty Hulk used some of it to make pork nachos for lunch the next day.  <\/p>\n<p><strong>Joey&#8217;s Ruling: Success, will definitely make again. <\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Welcome to Joey Cooks! In this new segment of my blog, I&#8217;ll be writing about some of my cooking (mis)adventures. Shorty Hulk calls me a &#8220;scratch cook&#8221; &#8211; basically, I tend to look through the cupboards, look through my recipes, look through the dark and dusky corners of my scattered mind (which is scary, trust&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"New Blog Post: Joey Cooks Boston Butt","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[225],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-joey-cooks"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2UnPK-7E","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/joeywrites.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/joeywrites.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/joeywrites.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joeywrites.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joeywrites.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=474"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/joeywrites.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/joeywrites.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joeywrites.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joeywrites.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}