It was a big Mother’s Day weekend - a special one in this house because it replicates the particular weekend when our daughter was born. Her birth was the Saturday before Mother’s Day, and I spent that Mother’s Day in the hospital cradling my beautiful newborn baby girl.
That baby girl is now 28, and was so busy with a pastry bag she hardly noticed the birthday. Even though she was too busy to eat, everyone at least fantasizes about a particular birthday meal. She didn’t have the energy and needed to think about her work, so it was convenient that she had purchased a Boston Butt for smoking a few days before.
As Tom instructed, I crusted it with Tony Chachere’s Spicy Blend Creole Seasoning and put it on the Big Green Egg. I put more charcoal in than Tom is wont to do, so there were times flames shot up. The birthday girl and I like a black char to meat. (We would have made excellent Caveman spouses, I think)
Luckily I also remembered to add a dish of water in the smoker to moisten the meat. As the water evaporated, I poured some of the Champagne from the bottle still left from our opening day toast on the new radio show. I hoped it would impart some fruity notes to the meat. (We didn’t notice any but we loved the results of the smoking.)
I did pull a little shred once when I checked it and felt that it was not salty enough, so I salted it right on the pit from the salt shaker, and took a brush and dipped the water from the dish in the Big Green Egg and brushed the meat with the water to dissolve the salt and moisten the meat. This worked beautifully, so beautifully that I brushed the meat with the same water after we had pulled some of it.
Five to six hours later, we removed a gorgeous glistening roast pork ready for pulling apart. It shredded beautifully, until we got to the middle part, which was still firm enough to slice. We didn’t want to do this, so it went back on the grill and we made pulled pork poor boys.
Earlier in the day I got some coleslaw fixins and used Tom’s recipe for coleslaw (my favorite). We toasted the bread and piled high a layer of the roasted meat and coleslaw.
It was not a grand affair for a birthday dinner, but under the circumstances it felt just right. A very busy birthday girl had a very quick meal of a favorite thing to eat. That works.
