Every Wednesday is Domestic Science day at Living Behind the Curve.

This week, I bring you one of my all-time favorite slow cooker recipes. It’s incredibly lip-smackingly, plate-lickingly good.

Sweet and Sour Shin Kicker

In your slow cooker, combine:
2 cups brown sugar
1/4 cup flour
1 cup water
1/2 cup vinegar (red wine or apple cider work best)
1/4 cup soy sauce
2 tablespoons ketchup
1 teaspoon ginger paste or diced fresh ginger
1 teaspoon garlic paste or diced fresh garlic
3-4 lbs. beef shin meat, with bone

Cover and cook on low for 7-10 hours. Serve over your preferred starch. (We prefer cous cous made with beef stock.)

Chef’s Notes:

• I don’t recommend using dried/powdered ginger or garlic — fresh or jarred is best here. If buying jarred, read the label before you buy - many are packed in corn syrup and other un-necessaries. Try to buy nothing but the ingredient and olive oil.
• If making this ahead for freezing, dump all ingredients into a gallon-sized zip-top freezer bag. When ready to cook, cut the bag away from the frozen block of goo, and dump it straight into the slow cooker. Cook for 10 hours on low.
• Beef shins are a weird cut of meat — they’re traditionally used for making stock. If you just threw a beef shin on the grill, it’d be ridiculously tough. However, since we’re cooking this at a low temperature for so long, the connective tissue that would otherwise make this meat tough dissolves into gelatin, and the result is tender fall-apart meat and deliciously unctuous sauce.