Creative Cookery

     Have you ever read through a recipe and discovered that you don't have all the ingredients listed?  That can certainly be vexing when you are all set to cook up something special and suddenly realize that you are missing something crucial.  So instead of getting in the car and driving to the local store, why not improvise?  Sometimes serendipitous things can occur and the end result may be even better than what you had planned.

     Such was the case recently when I decided to bake the Pork and Apple Pie that I had mentioned in a previous posting.  I actually had several recipes in front of me and each called for different ingredients: variations on a theme as it were.  But I did not have either ground pork or a pork loin that I could cube.  It would be very difficult, indeed, to bake this standard of the UK kitchen without one of the main elements.  But I did have a pork shoulder that had been defrosting in the refrigerator for a planned Carolina pulled pork dinner.  So before putting the entire shoulder in the slow cooker with the spicy vinegar based sauce, I cut off a portion and roasted it briefly and then cut it into thin strips for the pie.

     The result was a delicious dinner that combined the pork with sliced golden delicious apples.  And no one was the wiser!!!