Never fear, even though posts here have been photography-heavy lately, we haven’t given up cooking. We’ve made some really nice stuff lately, including our own tomato sauce for pasta, a truly fantastic standing rib roast dinner, and an original stir-fry shrimp recipe.
Here’s something we made a few weeks ago which turned out to be really good. It’s an olive-stuffed pork tenderloin, which we had with some rosemary-garlic potato wedges. The pork recipe came from Alton Brown’s book “I’m Just Here For The Food” which is a great book for understanding the underlying processes of cooking food. Rather than dividing the recipes up by the main ingredient as is usually the case, each section is arranged around a different method of heating – boiling, braising, roasting, grilling etc. There are some great recipes of course but the book is a bit deeper than your normal cookbook while still remaining easy to understand. I’d highly recommend it.
First we brined the tenderloin in a mixture of salt, sugar, peppercorns and cider vinegar. You boil everything in a saucepan for 10 minutes or so, add ice to bring it down to room temperature, then seal it up with the pork and put it in the fridge for a couple of hours.
Stuffing the pork!
Next, you need to make a tapenade with a cup or so in total of a couple types of pitted olives, olive oil, and a clove or two of garlic. I just put them all into a food processor and pulsed until I had a somewhat chunky paste. Then take your tenderloin and cut it open lengthwise, leaving half an inch of meat uncut on the bottom (so it opens like a hotdog bun). Make two more cuts like this either side of the first cut, stuff everything with the tapenade, and tie it back into its original shape with butcher’s twine.
Then it’s a simple matter of putting the pork on a rack in a roasting pan and putting it in the oven. I used a thermometer to test for the “done” temperature, but things went a little awry here. The recipe said to cook it to an internal temp of 145 degrees, which I did but the pork was still very rare. It took around 45 minutes to reach that temperature, and it needed another 20-25 minutes or so after that. Most other tenderloin recipes I read said to cook to 170 degrees, so maybe there’s a misprint in the book?
Either way it turned out to be delicious, and I’ll definitely be making it again soon. One thing I might try next time is to brown the meat in a pan before roasting it to try and make it a bit more presentable – as you can see from the pictures the final article, while tasting great, is not the most attractive thing in the world!
The finished article. Delicious even if it doesn't look beautiful!
And to finish off here are the potatoes. These are very easy to do, just scrub and cut up some red potatoes into wedges, toss with olive oil, salt and rosemary, and cook (turning every 10 minutes) at 450 degrees for about 30 minutes. Peel some cloves of garlic (as much as you want, I think we had 8 cloves in here) and throw them in after you’ve turned the potatoes for the first time. When they’re done, take a small amount of cider vinegar, squeeze the roasted garlic into it, mix well and pour over the wedges. Add some green onion slices as a garnish. Very easy and very tasty.
