From Grill To Crock Pot To Leftovers

As much as we love to experiment and try new things, we also love to spend as little as possible during weekly grocery shopping, which is why Megan and I plan ahead to interconnect our meals throughout the month. For today's entry in our cooking blog, we'll explain how we took one main item - homemade barbecue sauce - and took it from grill to crock pot to microwaved leftovers.

This particular sauce was actually the second barbecue sauce we ever made, which was taken in a much spicier direction than the first attempt with smoky raspberry BBQ sauce. While this was a successful creation, and I'd recommend anyone try if you want to start experimenting with your own sauces, we have since significantly changed up our recipe. We now use much fewer ingredients and generally don't use tomato paste, instead basing the sauce around soda. This lets us create interesting flavor bases, like root beer, cherry, or even apple, and using soda instead of water also eliminates the need for corn syrup, since the soda already has plenty of sugar.

Here's the main ingredients we used for this particular sauce experiment:

To make sure there aren't any clumps and the flavor remains consistent with each bite, we first grind up all the dry ingredients with a mortar and pestle.

While the dry ingredients are being ground up, Megan whisks together all the liquid ingredients in a large liquid measuring cup.

The two finally meet in a medium sauce pan on the stove over medium-high heat so that it can eventually reach a boil.

The dry and liquid ingredients are whisked together thoroughly until the mixture is uniform in texture and color.

After coming to a boil, the sauce is turned down to a low heat and simmered for as long as necessary for it to reduce down and become thick enough to use. This can take anywhere from 45 minutes to three hours, depending on which ingredients you are using and how much of any given ingredient you've thrown in.

The end result is a thick and delicious sauce that easily rivals anything you'll find in a bottle on the grocery store shelf.  Speaking of, we have now started reusing plastic bottles from the store, putting our homemade sauces into BBQ or ketchup squirt bottles so we don't have to throw them away every time.

The sauce was of course used for outdoor grilling (and you can see how we use BBQ sauce with ribs in our various pork rib blogs), but that wasn't its only application. To interconnect our meals and make use of this sauce for another tasty dinner, we put together another BBQ sauce centered meal using this beef chuck roast.  To get it ready, the roast is first seared over high heat on a metal skillet.

As the first side quickly browns, it's turned over so that each end gets cooked through and we get a uniform color.

The meat isn't completely cooked yet, but we're still going to pull it off the skillet and throw it in the crock pot for several hours. After being mostly heated through, the beef comes back out of the slow cooker out for slicing.

The whole roast is sliced into small pieces, so that each and every piece can be properly flavored by the BBQ sauce.

After the slicing is finished, the beef is returned to the crock pot for a final round of cooking.

The sauce goes in next, and everything is mixed together so all the beef is covered by delicious (and spicy!) sauce.

After the beef and sauce are cooked together we've got the beef equivalent of pulled pork ready to go on a sandwich!

As usual, we had a side salad to go with our meat-centered dinner. This time around we had a fruit-heavy salad, using strawberries and a fruit dressing.

The slow cooked beef is spooned onto a hamburger bun along with a few slices of cheddar. No extra condiments are required, but if you like it a little more moist, throw on some additional sauce.

This is Megan's finished plate, and she's gone with a poppyseed dressing instead and also sliced some cheese onto her salad.  These sandwiches are fairly quick to put together, since the crock pot does most of the work, and we've made a few variations on this basic meal. Coming up in another blog we'll cover a pork version using a five star apple BBQ sauce.

The slow cooker beef roast ended up making more meat than we could put away in one sitting, so the leftovers were re-purposed for a different meal the next day that provided more variety. Instead of having the same thing again, we reheated the leftover beef and spooned it over a bed of mashed potatoes, along with a side of veggies covered in seasonings.  By combining these different ingredients and basing our meals around one main item, we not only get a wide variety of delicious meals, but also save money at the grocery store.