Top 5 Slow Cooker Recipes

This will very soon become your families favorite meal too!

My Favorite PMGK Slow Cooker Meal

The slow cooker is a busy parents best friend. I know if I wasn’t married, to the most amazing cook out there, that I would be using mine all the time. While Mr. PMGK was working on this top 5 list, I told him that this Chicken and Gravy recipe was my favorite of the 5. I told him I wished that he would make it more often. His response was, you know the recipe(as I shook my head and gave him the look). Everyone knows by now, I do not cook and why would I? I have him!

Slow Cooker Roast Beef always reminds me of Sunday dinners

Slow Cooker Dinners Made Easy

I can recognize the smell of Roast Beef in the crock pot anywhere. To this day the smell makes my mouth water. Very often growing up I’d wake up to the yummy smell Sunday mornings. If I was lucky I could pull a taste from the pot without someone noticing but with caution. If my mom caught me, it’d be a slap on the hand for sure. When you grow up in a home with 13 children, one crock pot full of meat is hardly enough to go around.

There is nothing little about these “lil smokies”!

Slow cooker recipes make Big Flavor meals

These lit’l smokies are so amazing! They have so much flavor. What I like best about them is that you can throw them in the crock pot and forget about them. Before you now it they’re done. They are my favorite to prepare when I have people over or when we’re making a meal that is going to take a while. No one is ever waiting around hungry for dinner if we make these to snack on while they wait.

Slow Cooker Chili no Beans

Don’t get me wrong this recipe is great but when I hear the word chili followed by the word no beans, my first thought is, “no beans?” When I think chili, I think beans! I’m Hispanic and we most definitely love our beans. However, Chili no beans are so good for so many things. They are my absolute favorite on chili cheese dogs. If you make a crock pot full of these for a party it will be gone before you now it. My husbands first intention, when he created this recipe, was to use this as a filling for fast food style tacos and burritos.

Kalua Pork Fries are a PMGK classic that I just can’t get enough of!

Slow Cooker Kalua Pork

Kalua is Hawaiian for barbecue and it’s traditionally cooked slow and low buried in the ground. Today’s technology, however, has changed drastically and allows us to use appliances like an oven or a Slow Cooker. PMGK makes Kalua Pork both ways. Either way it turns out perfect and so tender! There are benefits to cooking this dish either way. If we don’t want leftovers, we make it in the crock pot and just use a small butt roast instead of a full shoulder. If we want left overs, there are a lot of pulled pork style recipes that whole pork shoulder is good for. For example: My absolute favorite Kalua Pork recipe is our classic Kalua Pork Fries. If you haven’t tried them yet you are truly missing out but it doesn’t end there. My husband has posted Kalua Pork Burritos, Tamales and another recipe to cook the whole shoulder roast in the oven.

The top 5 best Slow Cooker Meals ever!

Are you excited to use your Slow Cooker yet?

If I haven’t gotten you excited about trying these recipes or at least using your crock pot a little more then I don’t know what will! What are you waiting for? Watch the new video above and let’s get started making dinner a whole lot easier and so much more delicious!

Pork Rinds

The Best Pork Rinds

Truthfully, making Pork Rinds isn’t all that difficult to do but it is quite a time consuming process and one that you might rather avoid if you don’t mind buying a bag of fried pig skins or cracklings, instead. I say that, mostly, because you don’t save any money, doing it yourself, and cooking these fresh doesn’t seem to improve the taste or flavor, in my opinion. I like to eat Pork Rinds as much as anyone, so don’t take my thoughts the wrong way. Just know that I’d rather just buy a premade bag instead of making them myself, next time(unless I have skin I don’t want to go to waste). So if nothing else, you can at least learn how it’s done and hopefully enjoy this post, recipe and the work I put in to making the Pork Rinds video.

Purchasing Skins for Pork Rinds

As you can see, in the photo above, I purchased my Skins, to make Pork Rinds, from my local Asian Market. Skins usually come from the Belly side of the pig, where the the bacon is removed. So there’s generally a ton of fat associated with the cuts. I paid $2 dollars a pound, for this package, so I didn’t really save any money vs. buying a premade bag of Pork Rinds. But, because the fat was already removed I didn’t get charged for all the extra weight. Though, I’m sure if it were still attached, the price would’ve been altered accordingly. Regardless, you should be able to purchase pig skin from any butcher that sells pork.

Making Pork Rinds

As I mentioned before, making Pork Rinds is time consuming and quite tedious. Even though the majority of the fat content was removed from the skins, the skin needs to be boiled and scraped to ensure that all of the fat is gone. And it’s best to boil the skins whole, before cutting and slicing them into portions. This way you can do it in large sheets instead of individual 1 inch pieces. Removing the fat, completely, helps to aerate the skin when it bakes and helps the Rinds fluff up more when they’re frying. In the video, I Boil the Pork Rinds for 30 minutes, strain and then baked them, on low, for approximately 4 hours before frying. Then once they are removed from the oven, they can be dropped in a deep fryer set at 350 degrees Fahrenheit, for 2 minutes.

Fried Pork Rinds

A few things you need to consider, when making Pork Rinds, is that there are several different ways you can screw these up. If you’ve ever bitten into a pork rind that just about broke your tooth or was just too hard to chew, then you need to pay attention to a few things. First, cut off tough and discolored edges that seem dried out and pleathery. Second, again, be sure to scrape out the fat. And third, be sure to remove all of the pieces that that didn’t puff up in the fryer. You follow those three easy steps and all of your teeth will stay intact.

As far as seasonings go, anything with onion and garlic powder in them is generally a good way to go but you can use ranch powder, adobo, pico de gallo or just plain old salt and pepper.

Pork Rinds Ingredients:

2 lbs Pig Skin
2 Quarts Water
1/4 cup Salt
Oil for Frying
You’re Favorite Seasoning

Be sure to remove all of the fat from the skin, boil the skin for 30 minutes, bake the skins on low for 2 to 4 hours and
deep fry the skins at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for approximately 2 minutes. Place the Pork Rinds on paper towels and
season with your favorite seasoning or salt.

Kalua Pork Burrito

The Best Kalua Pork Burrito

This Kalua Pork Burrito is so refreshing it’s like a tall cold glass of water, it’s that good. Hawaiian meets Tex-Mex and it’s not crudded up with too many spices or seasonings either. In fact, the only added seasoning in this entire combo is Hawaiian Sea Salt and Lime Juice. So the great thing about that is you’re completely relying on the flavors of all of the other natural ingredients. But, if you “just gotta”, add Cumin to the pulled pork.

Pork Burrito made from Leftovers

Carnitas is what you normally here or read on a menu when you’re ordering a Pork Burrito. But this particular burrito was the direct results of my leftover Kalua Pork that was served up on my birthday. So whether you call it Carnitas or just another Pork Burrito, you’re going to love this Wrap. And just so you know, the list of recipes that can be made from a Kalua Pork Roast goes on and on and I’ll list the recipes I’ve already posted down below as well as the original Kalua Pork Roast recipe. Also, I’ve got a great Seafood Enchilada recipe that will blow you’re mind, along with the original Salsa recipe I use in this video.

Kalua Pork Roast(Oven), Kalua Pork Roast(Crock-Pot), Seafood Enchilada,
Pulled Pork Fries, Kalua Pork Tamales, Homemade Salsa

Kalua Pork Burrito Ingredients:

1 pkg Large Tortilla’s
1 Kalua Pork Roast
2 cups Rice
1 can Black Beans, large
1 tbsp Fresh Cilantro, chopped
2 Avocados, sliced
1/2 Lime, squeezed
1/2 lbs Cheese, graded
1/2 cup Salsa
1/2 cup Sour Cream, optional
Salt to taste, rice

Follow my recipe video tutorials and implement the ingredients to make this wonderful Kalua Pork Burrito.