Shoulder of British Pork slow cooked in Cola

I’m forever seeing news headlines like ‘Sunday dinner is a thing of the past.’ This saddens me. The benefits of eating together as a family on any day are immeasurable.

For a traditional roast in our house, it doesn’t even have to be a Sunday. We have roasts at least twice a week. For no other reason that they are healthy and they are the most economical way to cook because you get to eat them twice.

I do try to do a different type of meat every week but I do tend to get stuck in the chicken rut.

So this week, when chickens were quite expensive in the supermarket, I veered away from the poultry and headed for pork. Still British of course.

I got a small shoulder of British pork. It was on offer at £3.50.

Now I have heard of people cooking things in cola for a while now and, having never tried it myself, I thought it would work well with pork because of the sweetness.

I warmed the slow cooker, cut up one onion, two carrots and added a 500ml bottle of cola.I then topped it with boiling water out of the kettle to just about cover the pork and added pepper and a squirt of liquid stock (from a tube).

This was at 9am and I just left it until 5pm when I just gave it a quick brown in a pan.

While the meat was browning, I used a hand blender to liquidise the cola, carrot and onion liquid, added two ladles to a pan and, when it was boiling added a rue which I made with corn flour and two table spoons of the liquid stock.

As many of you know, the criticism of my food by Hubster can sometimes make it seem like I am living with Gordon Ramsay so I sat, waiting with baited breath while he ate a green bean first.

‘How’s the meat?’ I asked casually, tucking into my veggie sausage.

He replied that it was delicious and the best thing I’ve cooked in ages.

I was very pleased. I do worry now that two well received Sunday dinners in a row is setting me up for a big fall but we will see.

Why not have a go yourself? Believe me, if I wasn’t vegetarian, cooking in cola would be my ideal meal. It just doesn’t seem to marry well with Quorn.