So, Kim needs pork on New Year's day, I love pulled pork barbecue (more like I loooooooooooooooooooooooove pulled pork barbecue) so here is what I did, for posterity. I hope it works!

Ingredients

• 3lb. Pork Shoulder
• 2 cups apple cider vinegar
• 2 cups water
• 3 or so garlic cloves
• salt
• pepper
• 4-5 cloves
• tablespoon or so of paprika
• Coupla tablespoons of "liquid smoke"

Need

• Crockpot. I have a pretty big one.

I split the pork shoulder in half, "butterfly", so to speak, so as to allow the pork to (a) cook more thoughroughly (prolly not necesary) and, more importantly, (b) to get the flavors all mixed in better. I probably could have left the thing in one big piece. I set my slow crockery cooker ("crockpot" is trademarked, I think, and mine is not a "crockpot") to High, and let it cook for like three hours on high. At that point I set it to Low and let it cook for another four hours or so. Yes. Seven hours. Really. At the end of that time, the meat part of the shoulder was very very very tender, flaky, and "pull-ey".

The flavor could use a little work, though.

So, to fix the flavor, which I thought was too vinegary and maybe a little too much bitter undertone (the cloves?), I simply added sugar. About a 1/4 cup, actually. Seems like a lot, but remember there was 3 lbs of meat and about four cups of liquid added. The result was not sweet, but was much more balanced.

I removed the pork and carefully picked the meat off of the bones and enormously huge amount of FAT. Pigs is really fatty, no? Really really really fatty. Fat fat fat fat fat. This dish is not a lowfat meal. There is like, this big ol' piece of skin with an inch of fat, at least, along the entire inside, and this is over like the whole shoulder, and then are these veins of fat (as in "vein of gold" if I were, say, a gold miner, and not as in "veins through which blood flows") and the meat is all sandwiched in between in big hunks. Not a pretty sight if, say, you are a vegetarian. Especially if you are a vegetarian because you are disgusted by the thought of killing and eating poor helpless animals. Yum. Anyway, I ended up with roughly equal amounts of fat+bones and meat, by volume. I did not weigh the meat to see how much stuff I lost by weight. Maybe next time.

Anyway, I took the meat and kinda shredded it with a fork, put it and the liquid back into the crock pot, and let it heat up on high for an hour or so. Just to let the liquid's flavor seep into the meat, and then I set the thing back to Low. I drained out 90% or more of the liquid and am now sitting here trying to decide how to turn it into a tasty barbecue sauce. Molasses? Ketchup? Honey? Tabasco? We shall see...

Turning the Liquid Into BBQ Sauce

So I had like four cups of "liquid" in a separate bowl, now, and this liquid was a juicy, vinegary broth. I experimented by splitting the broth into two portions to make two different kinds of sauces. To the first one I added

• Two tablespoons of molasses
• A teaspoon, maybe less, of ground cinammon

Just an experiment! I thought the cinnamon brought out a rich smoky flavor and went well with the molasses, and also went well with the pork. But wife (and brother in law) said no way -- too much like a cinnamon cookie!

To the second one I added two tablespoons of honey and a half teaspoon of ginger. This one also tasted good, and wifey liked it, but I actually liked the cinnamon one better.

These sauces were NOT thick at all, though. Very thin, runny sauces. I even cooked them down for a while, but any thicker and I would've had like one tablespoon of sauce. How does one thicken this sort of thing? Flour roux like a gravy? Corn starch?

Anyways, thanks for reading. Happy New Year!