A couple of weeks ago my daughters school had a “luau night” complete with hula dancers, a ukulele show and Hawaiian dinner. I haven’t had kalua pork in a long time and had completely forgotten about it but I will not be making that mistake again! It was SO good! I also had the macaroni salad (mac salad) which I didn’t care for but that’s not unusual for me as I don’t usually like potato or pasta salads unless they are homemade.

The next day I checked out what Pinterest had to say about kalua pork and lucky for me its pretty easy! It is also a crock pot recipe which I have been wanting to add more to my repertoire 🙂

I didn’t take a bunch of pictures but its not really needed, with only 3 (yes that is correct THREE) ingredients, you can’t go wrong.

Kalua Pork

• 1 4-6lb pork shoulder (mine was about 5.5 lbs and had a bone in)
• 2-3 tablespoons Himalayan salt (the pink salt you see everywhere) I would have used Hawaiian salt if I had it… but I didn’t
• 2-3 tablespoons liquid smoke

1. Put pork in crock pot.
2. Stab pork with a sharp knife all over.
3. Rub salt all over and then sprinkle with liquid smoke.
4. Turn crock pot on low and cook for 8-10 hours, flipping about half way through.

Do not add water or any other liquid! The juices and fat from the pork will be enough.

It is done when it shreds easily.

I decided to add half of a green cabbage to it when it had about an hour left, I just cut it up into  large chunks and put on top of meat in crock pot and then put lid back on. Once the meat was done I took it (and the cabbage) out and put it on a cutting board and shredded it. I put all of the liquid into a fat separator and put it in the fridge (the fat didn’t really have time to separate but it did all settle on the top and was really easy to pour out just the juices). I then returned the meat and cabbage to the crock pot and poured the juices back in and it was done!

At about the time I flipped the meat (half way) I decided to make mac salad, I didn’t have any macaroni though so used rotini. I had looked through a bunch of recipes online and kinda threw this together:

Mac Salad

• 8oz rotini (cooked per box)
• 1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar
• 1/2 cup mayo, plus a spoon full
• 1/4 cup shredded carrot
• 1/4 cup shredded onion (very mushy like)
• Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

1. Make Rotini and cool under cold water
2. Sprinkle pasta with ACV
3. Mix pasta with the rest of the ingredients and let sit in the fridge for a couple of hours
4. Right before eating take out of fridge and mix in extra spoonful of mayo.

I also made a coleslaw out of the other half of cabbage using this recipe from Damn Delicious (except I didn’t have any apple or purple cabbage, that would have made it really good, I just didn’t feel like going to the store). I really like this recipe since it uses only a little bit of mayo and has olive oil and fresh lemon juice.

About 20 minutes before the meat was done I also made some white sticky rice.

 This meal was SO good! I really liked that the kalua pork was so flavorful but simple and that I was able to make the sides in advance so that when we were going to eat I just pulled everything out and dinner was served!