pulled pork sandwiches with maui onion straws

Two new "firsts" were created in our kitchen last night. I tried my hand at pulled pork sandwiches, recipe courtesy of Tyler Florence. The paste to marinate the pork had a great flavor combination, I thought the meat would be very tasty, but unfortunately I was disappointed by the outcome. It tasted like every other pulled pork sandwich I've had at restaurants (before they pour on the BBQ sauce). I even let it marinate overnight for maximum effectiveness. Not that it wasn't good, but I was frankly expecting so much more. The meat really does have to be sliced like the recipe calls for, it's too tough to shred apart with forks, but it wasn't chewy to eat, even my daughter didn't have a problem eating it and she sometimes doesn't care for the texture of meat. I was hoping for the pork to be more like the fall apart texture that a roast gets when it's cooked in the slow cooker all day and a greater penetration of the flavors of the paste.

I choose an alternate topping to the sandwich which brings me to my second "first" from last night. Rather than the coleslaw that Tyler recommends in his recipe, I went with Guy Fieri's Maui Onion Straws to top off the pork. Great decision. They were awesome. My husband would be very upset if we didn't have those again. The only bad thing about this part of the dinner was that I halved the recipe. We could have eaten the whole onion, no problem. I think you could pretty much top any sandwich with those onion straws and it would bring it to a whole new level, except maybe peanut butter and jelly. That, my friends, might not be a great idea.