Woman's Day Pork Ragu

I have been making a large amount of crockpot recipes recently. Lately I seem to never have enough time to get everything done in a day and my crockpot is invaluable. I love being able to put ingredients together in the morning and by evening have a delicious meal. I always thought that when my oldest started school that I would have all this extra time to spend doing all the things that I never seemed to have time for with two at home. Unfortunately, I never realized that between homework, tennis, t-ball and everything else that I now seem to have less time rather than more. It's weeknights when I am running around trying to get thousands of things done that I find my crockpot to be a great time-saver. The November issue of Woman's Day Magazine had a recipe for Pork Ragu, which looked very easy with only twenty minutes of prep and filling with 51 grams of protein.

This recipe has 12 ingredients. It takes a total of 8 hours and twenty minutes of prep and cooking, 20 minutes of which is active and makes 4 servings. I had no problems finding any of the ingredients at my local grocery store with the exception of pappardelle noodles. Since I was unable to find the noodles I substituted wide egg noodles. I found my prep, including cooking the pasta noodles took slightly longer than the 20 minutes suggested by the recipe. As always I cooked the recipe on low in my slowcooker. I chose to leave off the parsley on the top of the dish, my two boys are currently on an anti-parsley kick. I followed the remainder of the recipe as written.

With 51 grams of protein and only 14 grams of fat per serving this dish is very filling and lower in fat than many slower cooker recipes. I liked that it is served over noodles and my substitution of egg noodles worked perfectly. This recipe made a significant amount of meat, much greater than the four servings suggested. I used the leftovers for another meal, which I cooked the liquid from the meat as a substitute for water in rice. The leftovers actually turned out even better than the original dish.

For the recipe go to Pork Ragu.