Recipe a Week Challenge: Carnitas Tacos

I'll be honest, I had some help with this one. 

From New Year's Day on, I committed to learning one new recipe every week in 2018.  The idea was to do it on my own, but when "Chef Nate" sees a recipe he's interested in, I can't say "no" to my fiancé wanting to help.  After all, part of the reason he wanted to help was because my 18 mile run on Saturday pretty much put me in a coma from the time I finished until the Oscars the following evening.

Everyone close to me knows one of my favorite foods in the entire world is tacos. Anything from Doritos Locos Tacos to authentic street tacos, I'm all about it.  In fact, the plan (wedding gods willing) is for us to serve a street taco bar to guests at our wedding this summer.  That's why we couldn't resist this delicious looking carnitas recipe to cook in our new Instant Pot!

We'd hate to put ourselves on the level of El Gallo Giro or The Tailgate when it comes to street tacos, but we're pretty impressed with how these game out! Nate did all the prep work of getting the ingredients cubed and measured into the pressure cooker.  That includes the ingredient we were most surprised to see in the list, orange juice.

I handled shredding the pork when it was time to take it out of the Instant Pot (mostly because Nate has no patience and his method was totally not working!)  We topped them with a little fresh like juice and served them in tortillas with our guest's choice of sour cream, guacamole, fresh cilantro and queso as additional toppings.

Instant Pot Carnitas (Via PaleOMG)

Ingredients

• 2 pounds pork shoulder, cubed
• 2 teaspoons salt
• 1 teaspoon cumin
• 1 teaspoon dried oregano
• 1/2 teaspoon black pepper
• 1 white onion, chopped
• 3 garlic cloves, minced
• 1 jalapeno pepper, diced
• 2 bay leaves
• Fresh lime juice from 2 limes
• 1.5 cups orange juice
• 1 cup chicken broth

Directions

• Press sauté button on electric pressure cooker.  Add pork cubes and brown for about 1- minutes
• Add rest of the ingredients and mix well.
• Press cancel, latch lid/close off pressure valve.  Use manual button to set Instant Pot to "high pressure" and adjust time to 30 minutes.
• After cooking, let cooker release on its own for 20 minutes,
• While pressure's releasing, prepare oven to broiler setting.
• Use fork to remove meat and shred apart.  Place in baking dish and squeeze lime juice over top of it. Let broil until pork browns/crisps.
• Serve on tortillas, lettuce wrap or plate with your choice of toppings or garnish.