Perfect Pulled Pork

These days, I'm all for making food on the weekend that will feed us during the week. It's just smart! It's also cost-effective, efficient, and gives us back time otherwise spent making dinner and cleaning it up. Pulled pork is a great for this purpose.

Here's the thing about pulled pork. It's completely low-maintenance. But yet it tastes like you spent hours caressing it, massaging it, and willing it to be tender.

Before trying this recipe, you should ask yourself a few questions:

• Can you order a Boston/pork butt from your butcher? I'll be honest, it feels a little silly to say to a grown man, but it pays off. Note that while it's called "pork butt", it's really a shoulder cut of meat.
• Can you mix spices and brown sugar together and rub them into the meat? 
• Can you place the pork in a low temp oven and not touch it for 8 hours? 
• Can you take a fork and shred the meat in a totally imperfect, and even haphazard, way?  

Cherry Almond Granola

Having a stash of homemade granola in the pantry is a beautiful thing. First of all, it makes for a great snack, is perfect for mixing in with yogurt/fruit for breakfast, and is good enough to sprinkle on top of vanilla ice cream. (So far this is sounding a lot like my post about Rhubarb Strawberry Sauce.)

Secondly, it's so easy to make — can you stir and do you have 30 minutes? And finally, it keeps for weeks in an airtight container/ziploc bag, so there's no feeling harried to finish it off.

The beauty of granola is that, once you have the basic technique down, you can really experiment as much as you want with the ingredient list. Like cashews? Great! Throw them in or sub out one of the other ingredients. Want dried cranberries instead? Cool — make it happen! Just beware that if you add more ingredients (as opposed to substituting something out), you'll need to up your quantities of honey and oil to make sure everything has a nice coating while baking.