Cooking The Hell Out of A Pork Shoulder

Last Saturday I decided that a grocery trip had to be taken, and that I would make a pork shoulder, which would feed me for the rest of the week. First, my plan went, I would go to my handy Shop-Rite in south Philly to buy some essentials before going to Whole Foods for the meat. Once at Shop-Rite I had a moment where I seriously considered buying the 8 pound pork shoulder for $8 before remembering Barbara Kingsolver and her husband's well written arguments against factory farming and ended up sticking to essentials (canned olives, for example, are essential in my life). When I got to Whole Foods I asked for a 8 pound shoulder and learned that the cost of my conscience would be nearly $25, so I went with a smaller size, which only cost my conscience $15....either way, man, that's way more money that the factory. I then made one of the most tasty of pork shoulders yet. I made a sauce of cherry tomatoes, cider vinegar, brown sugar, garlic, cumin, coriander, mushrooms and a few other things (salt and pepper among them), smothered the shoulder in said sauce (after stabbing it all over and poking fresh rosemary in those gaping wounds) and then cooked the beast for six hours. Three hours in I plopped a good number of roughly chopped mushrooms into the sauce that pooled at the bottom of the dutch oven.
I also sliced some thin potatoes and mixed them with olive oil, half a red onion, half a green pepper, a few cherry tomatoes and about 1/4th of a cup of grated Mt Vikos Kasseri cheese ($18.99 a pound at whole foods, but I found a little remnant pece for $3), olive oil, salt and ground pepper. Baked that up as well. I'm not going to lie, I didn't time the potatoes right and they turned out not to be entirely cooked when I was ready to eat them, but they look good. S., my roommate, also made potatoes at the same time so that, at one point, our oven had two pyrex dishes of potatoes cooking within it...I commented that it was like a potato show down, which made S. laugh...except that, in the end, his potatoes won (I tried them, they were better than mine, sigh).
While my potatoes may have been an epic potato FAIL, the pork and mushrooms were really, really good. S. could back me up on this, if I let him know I had a blog and asked him to comment, which I have not. So, for dinner I had my not perfect potatoes, my sublime pork and some of the salad S. had prepared to go with his own potatoes. Seriously, the mushrooms soaked up all the flavors of the sauce in this marvelous way, and the rosemary distributed throughout the, admittedly small, shoulder really embedded itself into the meat (embedded is not the right word, nor is embraced, but it starts with 'em' and I can't think of it at the moment) in a way that informed the sauce, which had not a singular rosemary note. Success! Raging success! It's a shame I don't measure out these things I do so that I can exactly replicate them, but I know the basic principles for success and that must count for something. Right?
And it's true, the pork fed me through today. While it wasn't as large a cut, which meant that I didn't turn any of it into my version of pulled pork, it did have a better texture and consistency. Pork shoulder, by its very nature, is a fatty piece of the pig but, compared to what I would have bought at Shop-Rite, the Whole Foods cut was pretty lean. The leanness translated into more actual eating without compromising the whole point of slow cooking the thing (to let the fat soak into the meat for extra tender tastiness).