The Tenderest Pork Ever

About author / Christine Gable

Culinary enthusiast; kids cuisine and slow cooking; magazine recipe developer; professional writer. Her simple recipes are great for family dinners.

Ideas. They’re what keep the world goin’ round. It’s been said that there aren’t any new ideas in the world, that it’s the specific slant or angle that you put on an idea that makes it special, makes it worth its weight in gold.

I’d have to say it’s pretty much the same with recipes. Are there really any new flavor configurations that haven’t been tried before? Doubtful. It’s the little tweaks, the special touches that we each add to make that ____ (you fill in the blank) precisely ours, precisely extra-special. I can’t help but think that’s why we all enjoy reading cookbooks so much. I recently learned that over 24,000 cookbooks are published each year. 24,000?! That’s a heck of a lot of cookbooks!

Just think of all the ideas and inspiration for good eating contained in those pages. No wonder so many of us use them as before-bedtime reading. There really is nothing more comforting than perusing a fine selection of food, delightfully presented and photographed for our viewing pleasure (and anticipation)!

Aren’t we all just looking for some beautiful inspiration? Especially when it comes to food, day in and day out. We love eating out and we love eating new and different things and we love eating with friends. They’re all fun and interesting ways to spruce up the ordinary day-in and day-out humdrum routine.

That’s why I was so thrilled recently to receive an email from Lori. She wrote that she was looking for a recipe for a slow cooker meal, one that she had recently seen on TV. Luckily she googled ‘savvy cooker’ and found CDKitchen and my smiling face.

The recipe that she was looking for sounded divine, especially with the cooler fall temperatures pulling us indoors for heartier, warming meals: Apples and onions simmering beneath a tender fork-apart pork roast, surrounded by large, steaming chunks of potatoes and carrots. It sounded like a match made in heaven (or at least one for your handy, dandy slow cooker). Yum.

Had a busy weekend and tossed Lori’s idea into the slow cooker one day before heading out for an action-packed agenda. Thankfully when I returned the house smelled wonderful. The experiment worked! You see, I didn’t want to make a stew—I just wanted to have a delightfully slow-cooked pork roast that would fall apart on the fork. Would half a cup of water do the trick to keep the vegetables moist enough to cook fully?

I’m glad to report that it did indeed—just enough liquid to get the apples simmering nicely while they released their succulent juices. Then the lid kept everything tucked inside, all moist and delicious. While I found out at the last minute that I didn’t have any onions to pair with the apples for a savory surprise, Lori emailed me later to say that she used just onion and apples—without the potatoes and carrots (no room in the slow cooker!)—so know that this is totally adaptable to what you’ve got on hand.

Here’s an excellent way to make pork roast, and if you have 10 to 15 minutes, you can get dinner going before you head out the door in the morning. One thing I do to get the whole shebang pulled together quicker is to gather the ingredients together first—I find that it’s so much faster to have everything on the kitchen counter before starting to load the crockpot.

Serves/Makes: 4

• 4 pounds pork roast
• 1 tablespoon oil
• 4 apples
• 6 large potatoes
• 1 bag baby carrots
• 1/2 cup water
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 dash black pepper