This Slow Cooker Asian-Style Pulled Pork is fall-apart tender and loaded with sweet, savory and spicy flavor from homemade gochujang BBQ sauce. Serve it over rice with crisp vegetables or pile it onto buns for an easy hands-off dinner.

Slow Cooker Pulled Pork With A Bold Asian BBQ Sauce

I’ve always been a little more nervous developing slow cooker recipes than stovetop recipes. On the stove, if I overdo the liquid by a smidge, I can usually just cook it down. Once the lid goes on the slow cooker, I’m basically committed.

This Asian-style pulled pork keeps things much simpler. Pork shoulder gets cut into a few large pieces, seasoned and cooked with just enough Asian BBQ Sauce to flavor the meat without drowning it. Once the pork is tender enough to shred, it gets tossed with more sauce so the gochujang, garlic, ginger and sesame flavors stay prominent.

The result is tender, saucy pork that works just as well in a hamburger bun as it does piled over cooked rice with crunchy vegetables.

This Asian Cucumber Salad is cool, crisp and tangy, with thinly sliced cucumber, green onion, rice vinegar and toasted sesame oil. It takes about 5 minutes to toss together, then a quick chill lets all those sweet, savory and nutty flavors soak in.

This Started As A Rice Bowl Topping, But It’s Too Useful To Stop There

I originally developed this sesame cucumber salad as the cool, crunchy component for a Asian Pulled Pork rice bowl. But once I made it, I realized I didn’t need to wait for the rice bowl to make it again. It’s just as useful as a quick side dish for grilled meat, salmon or pretty much anything served with rice.

There’s almost no technique required here. Thinly sliced cucumber and green onion get tossed directly with rice vinegar, sugar, sesame seeds, toasted sesame oil and salt, then everything chills together for 30 minutes. The cucumber picks up plenty of sweet-tangy sesame flavor while still keeping its crunch.

This Italian Sausage Pasta is a 30-minute dinner with deeply browned sausage, tender kale and strozzapreti tossed in a creamy white wine and Parmesan sauce. It’s rich and comforting, but still weeknight-practical.

Why I Stopped Making This Italian Sausage Pasta One-Pot

This recipe used to be a one-pot pasta, but over time I’ve moved away from cooking pasta that way. It’s convenient, but I just don’t like the texture as much. Cooking the pasta separately gives me much better control over the doneness and keeps the finished sauce from getting overly starchy.

So yes, this version dirties one extra pot. I think it’s worth it. The sausage gets deeply browned first, then onion, garlic, white wine and cream turn all those browned bits into the base of the sauce. Kale wilts right into the pasta, and Parmesan added off the heat makes everything smooth and rich.

It’s the kind of Italian sausage pasta I actually want on a weeknight: rich and comforting, but with enough greens that I don’t feel like I need a side dish, and just enough heat from the red pepper flakes to keep it from being boring.

These Mummy Pigs In A Blanket are wrapped in crisp, flaky puff pastry instead of crescent dough, then served with Curry Ketchup, Pesto Ranch and Honey Mustard for a Halloween appetizer that’s as good to eat as it is cute.

The Puff Pastry Upgrade That Made Me Like Pigs In A Blanket

Considering I’m basically the queen of Halloween Food Ideas, it’s honestly surprising it took me this long to make mummy pigs in a blanket.

Part of the delay might be that I’ve never been a huge pigs-in-a-blanket person. Swapping the usual crescent dough for puff pastry changed that. The pastry bakes up crisper, flakier and a little less doughy around the Little Smokies, which is much more my speed (it was definitely the doughiness that gave me the ick before).

And because a Halloween appetizer should still taste genuinely good once everybody is done taking pictures of it, I’m serving these with three sauces. The homemade Curry Ketchup paired with the salty hot dogs was the surprise favorite for me, but Pesto Ranch and Honey Mustard give everybody options.

Halloween Chex Mix with Chocolate and Cinnamon Chex baked in a maple-brown sugar coating, then loaded with pretzels, peanuts, Reese’s Pieces and candy corn.

The Chex Aisle Had Too Many Options, So We Chose Two

There were SO many flavors of Chex at the store when we developed this Halloween Chex Mix. Rather than choose just one, we settled on a combination of Chocolate Chex and Cinnamon Chex, which turned out to be exactly right.

The cereal gets baked with butter, maple syrup, brown sugar and cinnamon first, so this isn’t simply a bowl of cereal with Halloween candy dumped into it. The coating gets crisp and caramelized around the Chex, while all of the chocolate and candy stays intact because it’s added after the cereal cools.

Best of all, this one came out exactly how we wanted it on the first try. It’s sweet, salty, crunchy and unapologetically Halloween. Set out a big bowl at a party, package it up for friends, or add it to a spread of our Halloween Food Ideas.