Pulled Pork with Roasted Tomato Barbecue Sauce

Greetings brave humans!

It's coming up on late March and here in Kentucky we are staring down yet another snow forecast tonight. This is the fourth snow forecast/snowstorm this month (to reiterate, this is the month of MARCH) and I am going to have a for real nervous breakdown/move to Florida if it doesn't warm up to Spring temperatures soon.

We had one warm, magical day last weekend and Sam and I took it upon ourselves to pretend like it was summer and make some slow cooked pulled pork with roasted tomato barbecue sauce. At first we were going to just buy a bottle of sauce, but M gets reflux from most bottled tomato-based sauces. Fresh tomatoes don't bother him however, so we decided to slow roast some to see if we could achieve a loophole in the whole our-baby-gets-reflux-with-all-commercial-tomato-sauces problem.

First cover 3 lbs. of Boston butt pork with brown sugar and kosher salt, about 1/3 cup of each. You can wrap your meat and let this marinade sit in the fridge overnight, but we didn't have the foresight to do this, so our meat just sat for a couple of hours, and it still turned out super tender.

Behold. A pile of meat.

Meanwhile cut up 8 medium tomatoes, cover them with a drizzle of olive oil, minced fresh garlic, salt and pepper. Roast them for about 45 minutes at 300 degrees. And don't they look pretty right out of the oven!

Next put the meat in your slow cooker and let it cook on high heat for about 4 hours, flipping it once halfway through.

Let the tomatoes cool, then blend them in the food processor til smooth.

Break up the meat with some forks, so that they are in smaller pieces. Our pork was well cooked on the outside and a bit pink through the center. We poured the tomato sauce over the top, along with a few generous shakes of garlic powder, a few tablespoons of apple cider vinegar and another few tablespoons of brown sugar. Give the mixture a good stir and let it cook an additional 2 hours.

Pour off about 75% of the sauce and break the pork down into little pieces. We had a little bowl of sauce on the side if people wanted to add more. We also served green cabbage, cucumber, and dill slaw (similar recipe here. The only modification I made was to add about a Tablespoon of vegenaise to the dressing to cut the vinegar flavor down a bit) to go on top of the sandwiches, and man was it the perfect combo!

This turned out to be a great alternative to using bottled sauce. We will make it again soon!

Here's the whole recipe: