I had bought a very lean cut of beef (hongduggae-sal, 홍두깨살, a.k.a. beef eye round*) normally used by Koreans in jang-jorim, a boiled-beef dish in which the beef is cubed or chunked and left to boil a long while in a broth that's heavy with soy sauce. The beef can then be eaten as is, or it can be shredded and used as a topping/accent for other dishes. This cut is a bit risky, in terms of pulled beef, because it can dry out almost as soon as you pull it from the crock pot. I shredded my beef as fast as I could this morning, then sauced it all before everything dried up. A taste test after the saucing showed me that the meat was fine, and I immediately containerized the final product, which is why I didn't linger to take photos.
Yesterday's pulled pork has been totally eaten, so that was a loss. Today is really the start of the cooking project for Saturday. I've done the pulled beef, now, and tonight, I'll work on making the stuffing—well, technically, the dressing (because it doesn't go inside a turkey) for this weekend. I made my breakfast sausage last night, and an experimental cook showed that the sausage is both edible and fairly tasty. I infused the meat with the usual suspects in terms of herbs and spices, but I also added an immodest amount of maple syrup to the mix to make the sausage, well, maple-y. Stuffing is easy to make, in principle, but the prep work involves a ton of chopping, slicing, and mincing. That'll be meditative, I think. I'm not averse to the scut work that comes with preparing a meal.
As for pulled pork: I've rescheduled the prep for tomorrow night. I bought a second pork shoulder, plus a pork tenderloin to increase the meat-to-fat ratio. Gonna be good.
*This site makes the ludicrous claim that the eye round is "one of the few unredeemable cuts of meat; think tough and tasteless. Save money but eat well with chuck steak, the cut of big flavors and some tenderness." As is true for the rest of the beef-eating world, chuck is my go-to cut for making hamburgers, so I've got nothing against chuck. But what this lady writes about eye round indicates to me that she needs to take a trip out to Korea to see just how "unredeemable" this cut is. And hey: even I, despite being an utter non-expert when it comes to making Korean food, was able to discover a non-Korean way to "redeem" this perfectly fine, perfectly usable cut of meat. Sheesh.
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