This recipe combines two of my favorite food items: barbecue sauce and grits. Unfortunately it’s one of those recipes I just wasn’t able to photograph as well as I’d like, but it is delicious! I made an outstanding slow cooker Mongolian beef a few weeks ago. It was extremely flavorful, and the beef was fall apart tender. There will be lots of slow cooker beef recipes in the future that use a similar method to the Mongolian beef, and this is one of those recipes. It’s super easy, very hands-off, and versatile enough to handle a variety of sauce and gravy options.

So yes, this recipe is a slow cooker recipe, and therefore the beef tips are not barbecued (as in, the cooking method), but they are cooked in a barbecue sauce. I used a Kansas City style sauce for these, but because I’m originally from South Carolina, I added some mustard powder. Yeah, I’m partial to the South Carolina mustard sauce. The amount I added was enough to give it a different flavor dimension, but the mustard was definitely not front and center.

I was originally going to make these for sandwiches, but then I realized that my cornstarch is at my boyfriend’s house and I didn’t have any sandwich rolls. The cornstarch would have been necessary to thicken the sauce a bit. I looked in my pantry to see what I had available to serve this over. I had a few choices: rice, various pastas, spaetzle, and grits. I love grits, and I thought this would be a good way to incorporate them into a dinner entree.