Meal: Chipotle Citrus Marinated Pork Tenderloin, roasted potatoes, roasted carrots
Cooking time: 90 minutes, mostly hands off
Cost per person: hard to estimate; see below
Local ingredients: pork, potatoes, OJ (sort of - Florida oranges, locally processed)
Organic ingredients: carrots, garlic, vegetarian “chicken” stock powder

Wednesday night was new recipe night. The folks we get our eggs and breakfast sausage from have had other pork products lately, and we picked up a pound of pork tenderloins - split into 4 individual quarter pound pieces - this past week to do something with. (The fact that they were cut up and packaged individually made things so much easier, too. I cut apart the packaging and pulled two tenderloins out of the freezer to thaw, and left the other two in, where they’re waiting for next Wednesday’s dinner.) I poked around Simply Recipes, one of my new favorite places on the web, and found Chipotle Citrus Marinated Pork Tenderloin, which we made last night.

It was delicious. :)

I can’t leave well enough alone, so there were a few changes. First of all, in originally reading the recipe, I missed the shallots, so I simply used more garlic to compensate. We’re both spice wimps, so instead of chipotle peppers, I used just a touch (maybe an eighth of a teaspoon) of chipotle powder. Jeff doesn’t care for cilantro, so we skipped that. We were using a quarter of the meat called for, so I made a quarter of the sauce. And finally, I didn’t strain the sauce at the end; I wanted to eat all of that garlic, and I think the dish was better served for it.

The lemon really shines through in this dish. Next time, I may experiment with using a little less lemon and a little more OJ. I also have to wonder how it would do with lime juice instead of lemon juice. I think there are a lot of little tweaks that could be made to the recipe to create a variety of different sauces.

Finally, this was perfect on the pork, but I think it would be equally good with beef, chicken, or tofu.

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The roasted carrots were a surprise. You see, I don’t eat cooked carrots; I’ve had too many overboiled, mushy, gross carrots in my life, so I just stopped eating cooked carrots. However, a friend made these the other day and talked about them online, and they looked great, so I decided to give them a try (this is part of my mission to get more vegetables into my diet, which as you folks may have noticed, are often lacking.) The recipe, courtesy of Jessica Manning:

Roasted Carrots

2 lbs carrots
1 Tbsp Penzey’s Sunny Paris seasoning
2 Tbsp olive oil
kosher salt

Preheat oven to 350F.

Mix Sunny Paris and olive oil. Peel the carrots and cut them into 2″ - 3″ lengths on the bias. Toss carrots in seasoned olive oil, then spread them out on a baking sheet lined with aluminum foil. Sprinkle kosher salt over the mass of carrots. Bake for 40 minutes, or until carrots begin to just barely brown.

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A couple of notes: I missed the part about the aluminum foil (have I mentioned that I have a bad habit of not reading recipes all the way through when I basically know what I’m doing?) I made these in a Pyrex 8×8 glass container, and they turned out fine. Also, we don’t have Sunny Paris seasoning in the house, so I used kosher salt, pepper, thyme, and some “lemon and herb mix” that had been lurking at the back of the spice drawer. Rummage in your spice drawer. Pick out what sounds good. I only used about 5 carrots (and cut back on the oil accordingly) to make sure that I liked these. The carrots and the potatoes cooked at 350 for about 25 minutes, then went to 400 for the last 15, since that’s what the pork needed to roast at, and they didn’t suffer for it.

I was eating these out of the baking dish like candy, they were that good. I’m going to clean up the rest of the carrots in the house today and roast them, either for lunch or dinner (I haven’t decided yet), but there will be more roast carrots in my life today. Yum.

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It is hard to estimate the cost of this recipe. The pork was $6 a pound, but we only each ate a quarter pound, so that was $3 for the meat. We might have eaten 2 pounds of potatoes, and they were 75 cents a pound; I might have eaten half a pound of carrots, and they were $4.49 for a 5 pound bag, purchased weeks ago (organic carrots keep much better than conventional ones. Who knew?) With all the things that went into the sauce for the pork and the oil for roasting the vegetables, this might have been a $7 dinner total, so $3.50 per person. Definitely not one of our cheaper meals, but not terribly expensive either, especially for what we ate.