Crock Pot Carnitas

Life has changed, friends. My commute is now 40 minutes instead of 30 seconds, and both of us hungry lovers are back in graduate-level night classes. The days are gone when we could spend three hours on a recipe on a Wednesday night, then stage and photograph the leftovers on the next day between client calls. In fact, now that winter is coming, it's rarely bright enough to take a food picture for this blog when we're at home.

"I didn't choose the cube life, the cube life chose me."

Like most of the rest of the world, we're now on a quest for fast and cheap meals. We also want to do it with a little style, too.

But even though Joe's glorious recipe for carnitas, shredded pork simmered with full of Mexican spices, turned out to be amazing and easy in the crock pot, it didn't photograph well. So I took it for lunch and tried to set up a photo at my desk. When I sliced into an avocado to top the plate, the pit flew out and ping-ponged around my desk and I had to crawl underneath to get it out.

Rogue avocado pit. So much for "style".

Anyway, a great sale on boneless pork butt and a clean crock pot were the inspiration for this plug-in morning, eat-at-night version of his usual recipe. It's about as simple as you can get. Though the recipe looks long, a lot of the ingredients are optional toppings so that you can choose what you like.

Ingredients

1 1/2 lbs pork butt roast or pork shoulder, cut into 2" cubes
1 bay leaf
2 tsp lime zest
1 tbsp ground cumin
3 garlic cloves, minced
2 tsp oregano (we used fresh oregano from our windowsill plant)
1 medium onion, chopped
Salt and pepper to taste
12-16 tortillas

Toppings:
Sliced avocado
Shredded lettuce or cabbage
Chopped tomato
Chopped cilantro
Chopped onions
Salsa (if you were lucky enough to make jalapeno-peach salsa this summer, then by all means use it here)

Instructions

Place the meat cubes in the crock pot, then add all the rest of the main ingredients. Cover with water. We did this step on Sunday afternoon while we were working on that night's dinner, then put the slow cooker in the fridge for the next day.

Cook on high heat for 8-10 hours, depending on how your cooker works. If it tends to run hot, you might want to cook this on low heat all day. When we came home that night, the meat was perfectly shredded, but we like some crispy chunks of meat, so we fried it up a bit on the stove before eating.

When ready to serve, heat up the tortilla on a hot griddle, then serve with your favorite toppings. 

Serves 4-6.