Last Sunday, we made pork tenderloin, stuffing, and cranberry sauce. Jeff and I both love Thanksgiving dinner, so this was a psuedo-pre-Thanksgiving dinner.

I’d never made stuffing. It needed to go into the oven first, so out came the How to Cook Everything. However, his recipe called for insane amounts of butter, so I mostly just winged it. I browned up a little sausage. While that was cooking, I tore up some homemade hamburger rolls that I’d previously frozen and thawed Sunday night. They went into an 8×8 pan with some salt, pepper, sage, and thyme, a couple of glugs of olive oil, and just enough vegetable broth to moisten the whole mess. It went into the oven at 350 for about 40 minutes.

The pork tenderloin was easy - we get ours by the pound split into fourths, so I pulled out two fourths, thawed them, and browned them in a pan with some freshly diced garlic. Once they were browned, I pulled them out, sliced them into quarter inch slices, and put them back in the pan with a little vegetable broth, salt, pepper, sage, and thyme. I turned the heat down and let it simmer until the pork was cooked through and tender.

When the pork was most of the way cooked, I put on the cranberry sauce. At some point in the last couple years, I’d read a suggestion online that mixing canned cranberry sauce with applesauce would make very good cranberry sauce, and it certainly does. The twist Sunday night was that my applesauce was homemade. I’d always been intimidated by homemade applesauce, but we had a bunch of apples sitting on the counter that were too far gone to eat straight up, but weren’t too far gone for sauce yet. HTCE said that whole apples could put into a pan with about a half an inch of water, brought to a boil, then simmered until the apples had fallen apart and the sauce was the consistency desired. Lacking a food mill, I peeled and cored the apples first. Other than that, it really was that easy. The peeling and coring took about five minutes, and otherwise, the sauce cooked for an hour or so, with me sticking my head into the kitchen periodically to give it a stir and make sure it didn’t need more water or that it wasn’t burning. We can now cross something else off the list of things that we have to buy pre-made, at least when apples are in season, and once I learn how to can, that won’t be a problem.

So, part of the applesauce went into a can of organic cranberry sauce from the co-op, and the rest went into the fridge for lunches during the week. The cranberry sauce only took a few moments to heat through, and then dinner was ready.

This was a fairly cheap meal to make. The pork is $6 a pound, and we had half a pound. The stuffing cost under a dollar, even with the sausage, olive oil, broth, and and spices, because I can make rolls for pennies a batch. The cranberry sauce was on sale for $1.99 a can, and the apples were a dollar a pound (and, let’s face it, they were apples that we hadn’t gotten around to eating - it’s too easy to buy too much fruit when it’s in season - and would have gotten tossed if I hadn’t decided to try to make applesauce) and I probably used three pounds or so. There was leftover pork and stuffing for Jeff for lunch the next day, and cranberry sauce and apple sauce for days. Active prep time was low too - probably 10 minutes on the stuffing, 10 minutes on the sauce, and 10 minutes on the pork, with some cooking and stirring time in between. Overall, it was a nice Sunday evening dinner (our default for Sunday nights is salad; I’m not quite sure why, since Sunday is one night that I have the time to really cook something involved) for not a whole lot of time or money.