Single quotes within single quotes (PHP)

<?php $my_meta = "<strong>'BlogCat'</strong>"'
$temp = $wp_query; $wp_query= null; $wp_query = new WP_Query(); $wp_query->query('showposts=5'.'&paged='.$paged); query_posts('category_name=
	<?php
	global $wp_query;
	$postid = $wp_query->post->ID;
	echo get_post_meta($postid, $my_meta, true);
	?>
'.'&paged='.$paged);
?>

Using that gives me the following error:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_CONSTANT_ENCAPSED_STRING in /home/content/06/5371606/html/wp-content/themes/Srizzil2/blog.php on line 36

I’m not sure what you thought you were doing with the code but I thought it looked pretty mangled. There’s no category name being passed to the query; an extra opening <?php tag in the middle of the query arguments and other bits that make no sense at all. Best I can do is create 2 code snippets from it:

<?php
$temp = $wp_query;
$wp_query = new WP_Query(); $wp_query->query('showposts=5'.'&paged='.$paged); ?>

and:

<?php
$postid = $wp_query->post->ID;
$my_meta = "<strong>'BlogCat'</strong>";
echo get_post_meta($postid, $my_meta, true);
?>

you initial code is already totally broken:
there is all this php meta stuff in the middle of query_posts() parameters;
and you should either use WP_Query() or query_posts();

try:

<?php 	global $wp_query;
	$postid = $wp_query->post->ID;
	$blogcat = get_post_meta($postid, 'BlogCat', true);
	?>
$temp = $wp_query; $wp_query= null; $wp_query = new WP_Query(); $wp_query->query('posts_per_page=5&paged='.$paged . '&category_name='.$blogcat);
?>

Fantastic, that did the trick.

What I am trying to do is make the template look for the category to include using the custom field. This way I can use one template for multiple pages with more focussed categories.

There was a slight mistake, but I noticed it and corrected it. Here is the final working code.

<?php 	global $wp_query;
$postid = $wp_query->post->ID;
$blogcat = get_post_meta($postid, 'BlogCat', true);
$temp = $wp_query; $wp_query= null; $wp_query = new WP_Query(); $wp_query->query('posts_per_page=5&paged='.$paged . '&category_name='.$blogcat);
?>