Carolina Coney

For reasons I don't understand, July 23rd is National Hot Dog Day here in the USA. In celebration, I came up with the Carolina Coney. Here is what you need

Hot Dogs and buns
Left over pulled pork (finely chopped)
barbecue sauce
onions (finely chopped)

Heat up the pulled pork in a skillet or omelet pan. Cover it liberally with barbecue sauce while it is heating up. Cook the hot dogs. When everything is cooked/warmed up, put the dogs in the buns, slather them with the saucy pork shoulder and cover liberally with your favorite onions. I used green onions because that was what was in my fridge.

Enjoy.

BBQ Sauce In A Pinch

I'm a fan of making my own sauces, but like I talked about with rubs, it's not always worth the payoff, to me, to go through all the prep myself. If you need a sauce in a pinch and only have a bottle of the cheap stuff around and you want to kick it up a notch, here's one suggestion.

4 parts of your favorite cheap-o off the shelf store sauce
1 part cider vinegar
add your hot sauce of choice to taste

Mix well

That's it. The vinegar and hot sauce go a long way to cut the cloying sweetness of your average brand name sauce. It also thins it out a bit so if you want to put it in a squeeze bottle to put on sandwiches, it comes out a lot easier. Maybe it's me, but sauce you can stand a drumstick up in is overrated.

Side Benefit of Smoker in the Backyard

I was outside helping my wife with some work. I've got the smoker going with a pork shoulder on it. Sitting outside on a beautiful summer's day, in the shade, with a nice breeze blowing and getting some productive work done is nice. Doing all of that while smelling the divine mixture of wood smoke, charcoal and meat is, well, heavenly.

Sour Cherry Jalapeno Compote

A friend of ours has sour cherry trees that are completely covered in ripe cherries right now. We were able to go over and pick a few quarts. Most of them are going into some sweet desserts. I took some aside to make a topping for the steaks we are having tonight.

1 cup sour cherries
1/4 cup sugar
1 large jalapeno
dash of salt

Roast, peel and seed the jalapeno. Dice it. You can leave the seeds and membranes in if you want this to have more heat. I wanted it to be a little on the mellow side.

Remove the pits from the cherries.

Combine all ingredients in saucepan, bring to a boil. When boiling turn down to low. Cover. Let sit on the stove for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.

This seems like it would be delicious on just about everything. Rather than combine a great big pile of things that usually go into a barbecue sauce (onion, garlic, molasses, pepper, etc.) I really wanted to let the cherries shine through. I'd definitely use this in place of a Kansas city style sauce on ribs or a pulled pork sandwich.