Slow Cooker Sunday - Goulash

I love my slow cooker and when I heard about the sharing over at Mediocre Mum I just had to join in!

This week, I cooked Goulash.  I based my recipe on the one found in My Daddy Cooks recipe  book.  I say based as I used the traditional pork shoulder rather than beef as suggested in the recipe book.

So ingredients are

pork shoulder joint
bouillon or vegetable stock
2 onions
2/3 cloves garlic
2 peppers (green & red if poss)
caraway seeds
paprika
1 tin chopped tomatoes

rice to serve

parsley to garnish

We often find that cooking fatty meats in the slow cooker (like a big pork shoulder joint) to leave an oily scum on top the whole dish and we struggle with the taste too.  So to avoid this problem I decided this would be a 2 day job.

First off I cooked the pork shoulder in the slow cooker for about 6 hours on slow with a pint of bouillon just so there was some liquid in the pan.  While it was still hot I cut off all the fat around the outside and shredded the pork ready to use the next day.

Day 2 was chopping day!  I used 1 white onion, 1 red, a couple of cloves of garlic, 2 peppers (recipe says 1 green & 1 red but I only had red).

Are you making admiring looks at my knife?  I do love it!  Its heavy but not so heavy & big handled that my small hands cannot get to grips with it.  It has a beautiful ornate pattern too.  This piece of art was made by a friend of a friend.  The pattern was made during the welding process.   Its Japanese in design with 1 sided blade that cuts on the back stroke.  I love it!

According to Nick, the secret of his goulash is in the caraway seeds.  Luckily we already had some - I hate having to buy things just for a recipe.  That is one of the reasons why I like Nick's  book so much - he lets me know what are the optional ingredients!

I fried everything off with the spices (1tsp caraway & 2tbsp paprika) before adding some chopped tomatoes (is it just me or do you go through LOADS of this stuff each week too??).  I was supposed to add wine but I didn't have any - always forget to buy the stuff as I don't drink it!

Once everything was transferred to the slow cooker its just a case of cook it on low (or medium if you're in a rush) until you're ready to eat it.  This was about 6 hours on low then I took the lid off & turned it up high for the last half hour or so to boil off some of the liquid a bit.

The end result poured over rice in a bowl with some warm pitta on the side.