Pulled Pork, Candy Pecans, Chai Tea, Roasted Rabbit, Oatmeal Cookies, and Turkey Gizzards

Printable recipe at the bottom of the post for easy instant pot pulled pork!

Hello! It’s almost Christmas, can you even believe it? This time of year is SO busy for everyone. But cooking good food is always a priority. Ya gotta eat. The family’s got to eat.

This last week I made pulled pork with a pork shoulder. We like to get a whole hog from a local farm and we store it in a large chest freezer in the garage. So this was from our farm pig. You could also use pork butt for this.

I started out with a 3 and a half pound pork shoulder and cut it into large chunks, cutting around the bone. I like to use my kitchen meat shears for this–just a pair of sharp scissors that have been designated for use on meat only.

Combine your spices and rub all over the pieces. Then brown in your instant pot on saute mode. Add some broth and pressure cook for 45 min to 1 hour, depending on the size of your meat. Then take the meat out and shred it, and if you want, you can thicken the juices before adding them back in with the meat.

There are so many different ways to use shredded pork. Tacos, on top of salad, on baked potatoes, sliders, nachos, quesadillas, burritos… and on and on. I roasted some potatoes and served the pulled pork on top along with a salad.

While the pulled pork was cooking, I worked on some candied pecans for the salad. I used ghee and maple syrup and toasted them up in a skillet. It adds that perfect sweet bit of crunch!

On Tuesday I pulled out my Canadian cookbook, Feast, and tried out this chai blend. I didn’t have enough fresh ginger on hand so I haven’t made the chai yet! But I have the spices all ready to go. Can’t wait to see this through. Winter is the perfect time for a good chai tea!

That night I roasted a rabbit. It’s not very common to find rabbit at the store, so when I came across it, I’d snatched it up. It’s really more about the novelty of it, I think. It’s so fun to have something different. But rabbit honestly tastes a lot like chicken. I don’t think there’s any dark meat on there. There isn’t a whole lot of meat on a rabbit, actually. The back legs are where the most meat is and then you have to work for the meat on the rest of it. This was tasty though! I made a mushroom spinach quinoa to go with it.

Here’s what the produce haul looked like this week (plus a tiny photo bomber):

Oatmeal raisin cookies! These are my favorite. One of the rare recipes that I come back to again and again. I like to make them over the holidays. I made this as a double batch in order to bring some in for teacher’s at my daughter’s school.

This recipe is one that I have printed and keep in a binder from well over 10 years ago. It’s from Smitten Kitchen, and they actually still have it up on their site!

thick, chewy oatmeal raisin cookies

Yuuum. My family always loves when I make these cookies. (and the dough is delicious too.)

On Wednesday it was turkey gizzards and roasted squash.

I took a photo of the squash this time. But I don’t know what kind it is! It almost looks like a kabocha squash. It could be.

Anyway, it was soo good. sweet and buttery when roasted up.

Here are the turkey gizzards. They. Were. Humongous! I cooked them up with ghee, onion, garlic, and spices in a large skillet.

I also made a nice brussels slaw to go with this. Shredded the brussles sprouts,minced onion, shredded carrot, shredded radish, diced apple, apple juice sweetened dried cranberries, apple cider vinegar, avocado oil mayo, spices. Delicious.

Turkey gizzard is just like chicken gizzard, but bigger. The meat is dense and chewy and full of flavor.

Thursday we had pork chops with beet chips. It’s a lot of work making the beet chips and I thought I’d burned them, but they actually came out okay. Pork chops are better on the grill, but came out okay baked. A bit overdone on the pork chops. A bit over done on the beets. That’s called balance.

On Friday I got to go on a breakfast date with my sweetie! Here’s some food that I didn’t make. That almond milk chai was sooo good. And you can’t tell but under those eggs is a yummy skillet of ham and veggies.

Update on the pickled carrots. We’d made it a week since I made these and it was finally time to try them. Wow they look different than when I started these. All the colors kind of melded into a pinky orange.

They were pretty good. Next time I’d leave out the whole cloves.

And now a few… I don’t want to call them *fails* exactly. But they could have come out better. There’s room for improvement. We’ll got with that.

First shrimp and mashed potatoes. When I make shrimp, my go-to is shrimp scampi. We don’t have shrimp very often. But when I do, that’s what I make. Yet, it’s infrequent enough that I never remember to NOT put the ghee/butter in first. Wait, let me back up. When I make shrimp scampi, I start with heating butter in the pan. Then, I drain the shrimp. I remembered that the shrimp always seems to have extra water. So this time, I drained it in my salad spinner and then spun it like spinning lettuce. To get all the moisture out. I then dumped the water, and then spun it a second time. I even patted the shrimp with paper towels before adding it to the skillet for extra measure.

I don’t have photos of this. I must have been too focused on spinning my shrimp.

Anyway, I then added the shrimp to the ghee and started cooking it. After a bit the shrimp started looking pretty good. But! Despite all my efforts to not have excess water in there.. yup, out of nowhere–excess water. I scooped the shrimp out and tried to cook down the extra liquid at that point. So, picture just water and ghee and minced garlic in the pan. Yes, I could have dumped this in the sink and started again, but I didn’t want to pour that butter down the drain… and anyway this seemed like a good enough plan.

Success. I was able to cook it down so that there wasn’t a lot of water in the pan. I grabbed my bowl of shrimp and poured it back into the pan and what the what?! There had been water in the bottom of the bowl. From the shrimp. Dang! So now I had shrimp swimming in water again. But I thought it should be okay to cook the shrimp a bit longer… I tried to get the shrimp and ghee water cooked down again and nicely browned, but in the process, the shrimp was sadly well over cooked.

And then there were the mashed potatoes. I made a huge batch of mashed potatoes (with onion and turnip) in the instant pot, intending to use the leftovers in shepherd’s pie the next day. I had easily doubled the amount potatoes and so I doubled the amount of liquid. That liquid doubling was not necessary. But I didn’t realize that until I had started mashing the potatoes. Too late to dump. The mashed potatoes were still tasty, but they weren’t thick. My family always says I make mashed potatoes too thick though. So, there’s that.

And then there was the apple cinnamon oatmeal. Great, but too much cinnamon. Not a huge fail but annoying. I’ve made apple cinnamon oatmeal a ton of times, but when I try to measure out what I do in order to have an actual recipe to share–instead of just eyeballing it– I don’t always get it right. I’ll be back with this one. (For the record, 1 tsp is way too much cinnamon.)

And the shepherd’s pie.

Oh, the shepherd’s pie.

Not something that I’ve made in a very long time. But still, I figured I could wing it. Well, it didn’t come out as I intended. It was actually more of a shepherd’s soup. A delicious shepherd’s soup, but that’s not what I was going for! Why did the mashed potatoes sink to the bottom?? I think, again, this had too much liquid. Too much broth in there. And I didn’t bother thickening the sauce before adding it to the baking dish. Live and learn. In the end it didn’t matter because we all loved it anyway. The end result wasn’t quite so soupy looking. But I was so bummed I didn’t even take a photo! Next time I’ll document my fails better.

I’m itching to give this another go.

And finally, this morning I made pork heart… no, it wasn’t a fail! But I’ll save that story for next time.

And here’s a photo of my little recipe creator. We were having salmon salad with crackers and apples with almond butter for a weekday breakfast. She made a stack combining them all into a tasty bite. I like the way her mind works. Always experimenting like her mama.

Finally, here’s that recipe for the pulled pork:

Instant Pot Pulled Pork

• Servings: 6-8
• Difficulty: easy
• Rating: ★★★★★
• Print

An easy recipe for pulled pork using the instant pot.

Pulled Pork is flavorful and versatile. Use it in your favorite recipe, or eat it as is! Pork shoulder or pork butt work great here.

Ingredients

• 3-4 lb pork shoulder
• 2 tbs ghee/butter/oil
• 1 tbs coconut sugar
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp onion powder
• 1 tsp dried parsley
• 1 tsp chili powder
• 1/2 tsp pepper
• 1/2 tsp dried oregano
• 1/2 tsp paprika
• 1 tbs minced garlic
• 1 cup broth
• 1 tbs arrowroot powder
• 2 tbs cold water

Directions

1. Cut pork into 6-8 large chunks.
2. In a small bowl, combine coconut sugar, salt, onion powder, parsley, chili powder, pepper, oregano, and paprika. Rub the spice mixture on the pieces of pork.
3. Heat the ghee in the instant pot on saute mode and then brown the pork on all sides, working in batches. About 30 seconds per side. Remove pork from the pot.
4. Add garlic to the pot and quickly saute for a few seconds before adding the broth. Return meat chunks to the pot and set to pressure cook on high for 45 min to 1 hour, depending on the size of your meat. for 4 lbs cook for 1 hour.
5. When the instant pot beeps, vent the pressure and then, using a fork or tongs, remove the pork to a large bowl, leaving the juices in the pot.
6. Shred the pork with 2 forks.
7. In a small bowl, combine the arrowroot with the cold water and then pour into the juices. return the instant pot to saute mode and cook the sauce down to the desired thickness. Then pour over the shredded pork.

Happy Holidays!

Wishing you a happy time with your loved ones filled with love and good food.

-Jessi