BBQ and Tackling Dessert

It was a pretty big cooking weekend. I really should have spent some of the cooking time cleaning, but whatever.

New recipes included:

Ham and Bean Soup
Pulled Pork
The Lady's Barbecue Sauce
Cheesecake

All were pretty delicious, but only the sauce and cheesecake were from Paula Deen.

The Ham and Bean Soup was made in a crock pot with the bone and some meat from last weekend's Easter ham plus some navy beans.

Travis was a huge fan of the pulled pork, which really only involved rubbing seasoning all over a pork shoulder, wrapping it in foil, and baking it for about 5 hours. My favorite part about the meal was the Lady's Barbecue Sauce. It was vinegary, my favorite kind!

I nearly ruined the cheesecake with ingredient replacement. It is still tasty, but it's really not attractive at all. There is actually a hole in the middle from an accident while pouring on topping. Pouring? Yes, pouring.

I decided to replace sour cream with buttermilk and butter, because I was out of sour cream. But, I didn't have buttermilk either, so I used the trick of adding vinegar to milk and letting it stand. Genius, right? Not quite. With sour cream, the mix would have been thicker and spread onto the baked filling.

My mix just poured. And it bored a hole through the center of the cheesecake. Plus, it was still liquid after it baked. So, I just poured it off. Hence, the not lovely but still tasty cheesecake. I think one of the biggest factors in the tastiness may have been that I was also out of vanilla extract, so I replaced it with lemon extract. So, we'll call this weekend 1-1 with impromptu ingredient substitutions. Oh well, can't win them all I guess!