I'm a planner. I like to have a good idea of what I'm making for the week on Monday, so that I can soak beans or prepare marinades the day before in order to pull off whatever the meal is.

However, I always seem to have a night during the week where I have no plan and we fly by the seat of our pants. Often during these times, I come up with things that we continue to make.

This is one of those things.

We had a great piece of pork from the farmer's market sitting in my freezer that I had been itching to use. My husband had lofty plans of smoking it, but we haven't had a free weekend day in about a month, and that process requires all day TLC (nothing hard, but a watchful eye is good). So I decided that this would be the perfect opportunity for me to tackle a task I had been noodling over for awhile - making barbecue sauce!

I found what appeared to be a

, and decided to use that as my first foray into the field. It's a little intimidating because pit masters are so proud of their sauces and marinades, that you just wonder if they'd even be able to stomach something from the home cook!

Trepidations aside, this seemed like a good basic recipe to start with... and play around with of course. I ended up substituting maple syrup in for the sugar - adding slightly less as well.

BBQ Sauce (

)

Ingredients:

1 small onion (grated)

2 cloves garlic (grated)

1 cup ketchup

2 tablespoons dijon mustard

2 tablespoons brown sugar (I substituted maple syrup, 1.5 tablespoons)

2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce

2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar

1 tablespoon chipotle chili powder

1/2 teaspoon smoked hot paprika (I increased this amount to 1 teaspoon)

salt and pepper to taste

Mix everything together, and you're done!

The pork preparation was very easy. I used the slow cooker and let the low heat do its magic. I was pressed on time so I did not brown the meat first, but it was still very tender.

Basically the pork went in and then the sauce on top. Easy! It cooked on low for 5-6 hours and was falling apart. You can use any sauce you would like, but it was fun to experiment with making one.

For assembly of the toasts, I toasted some of my no-knead wheat bread while my onions were caramelizing. To caramelize the onions, you simply add approximately a tablespoon of oil to the pot and your onions, heat over low, stirring frequently until they reach a lovely golden brown. I used Swiss chard from our garden as the greens.

It ended up being a very simple, but really delicious summer dinner.