Family Fun Pork-Rib Ragu

With two kids under 5, I am always looking for quick, easy meals to get on the dinner table. Slow cooker recipes are a popular cooking method for me because I can put the ingredients in the crock pot in the morning and forget about it until dinner time. However, I tend to get stuck in a rut with the slow cooker, making the same beef recipes time and again. Recently, the April issue of Family Fun magazine had a recipe for Pork-Rib Ragu that looked like a great alternative to my normal slow cooker repertoire.

As with most slow cooker dishes, this recipe is very easy to prep and prepare. One recommendation that I have that the recipe does not suggest is to brown the pork ribs before placing in the slow cooker, it helps the meat to retain its juices and flavor. The ingredients were readily available, with the exception of the pork ribs. The only baby back ribs available in my area were far more than the 4 lbs required and very expensive. Spareribs were additionally unavailable so I purchased country ribs. I followed the recipe suggestion and served the dish over egg noodles. 

The taste of this dish was excellent. However, as with most pork slow cooker recipes that leave the bone-in, I was left with small pieces of pork bone in the finished product. While, this would be a minor problem for an adult, for a child it is a choking hazard. In the future for this recipe I would use a pork butt roast, which would have the same great pork flavor without the bone fragments. I will say that the flavor of this dish was great and would be something that my family would enjoy in the future made with the pork roast substitution. This is definitely a dish I would try again with the above mentioned modifications. 

For the recipe go to Family Fun Pork-Rib Ragu.