Frugal Cooking: An Epic Pork Roast

My best buy for last week was a 1.5kg pork shoulder roast which I got at the butcher’s counter at Kaiser’s. The meat came to less than €6 and we easily got three hearty suppers out of it. I’m really glad that I’ve decided to do a proper Sunday roast each week with the intent of using the leftovers creatively throughout the week. It makes suppers a lot easier to prepare and means that on Sundays we can have quite a feast, setting the day apart as something special.

This week I wanted to use some of my slowly accumulating spice-collection for seasoning the roast. I decided to adapt a slow-cooker recipe for oven-cooking and the results were really nice. Because the oven tends to bake the juices, rather than just drawing them out into a sauce, the honey makes it a bit of a pain for cleanup but the flavor was really good:

Honey Mustard Roast Pork

1.5kg bone-in pork shoulder

salt and pepper

1 clove garlic, crushed

4 tablespoons good mustard (ie grainy, dijon, German etc – not french’s!)

4 tablespoons honey

1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar

½ teaspoon dried leaf thyme

Rub salt & pepper into the pork and place in roaster. Combine garlic, mustard, honey, vinegar, and thyme; pour over the pork. Turn pork to coat thoroughly. I had to roast this uncovered, as I only have pizza pans and no tin foil, but you could probably cover it for the first hour or seventy-five minutes and only uncover it for browning at the end. Roasted in a 350º oven for about 35 minutes/pound.

So much roast!

I chopped the remainder of the roast in two, and used the side that had the bone in it to make the pork stronganoff recipe that I’d adapted a few weeks ago. It was even better than the first time! And the extra bonus was that I got to use up the last of the nasty budget spaetzel we had in the house. The main problem with the cheap spaetzel is that it tastes of water & a lack of salt, so this time since I didn’t have much of it left I cooked it and then tossed it with the stronganoff. Problem solved!

Stroganoff

The other half of the roast went towards a “dinner for breakfast” meal – I sliced the pork and heated it up on a relatively low temperature in a frying pan. While that was cooking I made applesauce pancakes to go with it. It wasn’t a bad combination, but it’s not the sort of thing I’d do often. Pancakes are too rich for me to eat regularly. And for anyone from the UK reading this, I made proper North American pancakes, not your thin crepes :)