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.

Meal: garlic-butter roasted pork, scalloped potatoes, plus a side salad for me
Cost: about $2.30 per serving, 3 servings all together per person
Time: 50 minutes, 30 of which was active prep time
Leftovers: a serving of pork and a serving of potatoes, which went with Jeff for lunch today
Local ingredients: pork, potatoes, cheese (Ohio), lettuce (mostly local, with some organic greens mixed in), tomatoes, mayonnaise, butter, milk, cream
Organic ingredients: garlic, spices

Our One Local Summer meal for this week was Thursday night, and was garlic-butter roasted pork and scalloped potatoes. Despite having made plenty of combinations of potatoes and cheese, I’d never made scalloped potatoes. I browsed a bunch of recipes online and a few in various cookbooks before I started.

First, pull the pork out of the freezer (our egg farmer sells pork tenderloin split up into 4 smaller pieces per package, so I cut two away from the other two, and get to leave two in the freezer. Nice.) and get it into a bowl of water to thaw. While that’s thawing, slice up a couple of pounds (8 or so medium) of potatoes thinly (1/8 to 1/4 of an inch) and place into shallow skillet of water. Bring to boil on your stove and boil for 3 minutes or so. While that’s boiling, grate your cheese (about a 1 1/4 cup, or more if you like your potatoes extra cheesy). Mix 1/2 cup milk and 1/4 cup cream and butter a 9×13 pan. When the potatoes have boiled, layer them into your pan. Dot them with butter, pour over the cream/milk mixture, and sprinkle with cheese. Put the pan into oven and turn it to 400.

Next, heat a stainless steel frying pan or other oven safe skillet. Melt a bit of butter in it, and while that melts, peel and chop several cloves of garlic (how much is up to you. We like garlic around here.) Pull the pork out of its wrapping and plop it in the pan. Cook the pork briefly on each side, until it is just brown. Dot the pork with more butter (this is not a particularly healthy meal), and sprinkle with thyme and salt and pepper. Coat the pork with garlic and put the pan into oven. Roast 20 minutes or until done. Your potatoes will be done by this point, with a nice crispy brown crust over a creamy cheese mixture. Make yourself a side salad out of some local greens and your dad’s tomatoes, and ranch dressing you made the night before. Feast.

Meal: BBQ Pork and Tofu Noodle Bowl
Cost: about $3 per person
Time: an hour, starting from thawing the meat. This could have been quicker, if I’d pulled the meat out earlier and been working efficiently, but I was goofing off in the kitchen and listening to music and talking to Jeff and doing dishes.
Leftovers: enough for lunch for me today. I win. :)
Local ingredients: pork, cucumber, green pepper
Organic ingredients: tofu, carrots, sugar

I love big, slurpy bowls of noodles. With sauce, with whatever bits of meats and vegetables are handy, in whatever flavors, hot, cold, I don’t care. (Google tells me that there are actually two pho places near our house. I’m going to have to investigate. Or else just bite the bullet and finally try making my own; our beef farmer periodically has oxtails.) (My love of soup, particularly Asian-flavored noodle soups, is a cousin to this love of slurpy noodle dishes.) Also, it’s been getting hotter and hotter here, and big slurpy bowls of cold noodles are one of the best solutions to the heat.

So, last night’s dinner started with this, and morphed with what I had on hand. I doubled the marinade, and it proved to be enough for a half pound of pound tenderloin (sliced into quarter inch wide strips) and a half a pound of tofu (sliced into very thin squares). The sake was subbed out with the “sweet mirrin sauce” I got at our Asian grocer last time, the oil was half sesame oil and half canola, and the five spice powder was left out entirely (it would help if I consistently read new recipes before going to the store for the week.) For the nuoc mam, instead of whole chilis I used Thai chili sauce (be gentle with it; add a little, taste, and add a little more. It’s potent) and a glob of lime juice instead of a slice of lime. I didn’t really measure everything, but just eyeballed it, adjusting the ingredients until it tasted right for us. We didn’t have bun on hand, so I used udon noodles. The tofu and the pork went on the Foreman grill (the only thing I would change; I think slow cooking the pork in a shallow pan, as I did the teriyaki pork the other night, would have made it much more tender). We served it up in big bowls, piling the cold noodles and pork and tofu with raw carrots, green peppers, and cucumbers, and tossing everything liberally with nuoc mam. Authentic? No. Tasty as heck? Oh, yes. When I make something like this, taste comes first, authenticity… later. Don’t get me wrong; I love culturally authentic food made by someone who knows what they’re doing, but when I’m cooking, my first concern is making something that tastes good and that we’re going to enjoy. And we did, every slurpy bite.

Meal: teriyaki pork wraps
Cost: about $2.50 per person
Time: about 45 minutes
Leftovers: some noodles
Local ingredients: pork, cucumber
Organic ingredients: flour

Last night was slated to be roasted pork wraps, but I didn’t get the pork roasted up earlier in the week like I’d intended to, and so we opted for teriyaki pork wraps instead. We recently raided our local Asian grocer so as to have teriyaki makings again, and we’ve been overdosing on the stuff (teriyaki tofu, udon, and squash and zucchini last Saturday; teriyaki tofu and green salad on Tuesday; and last night.) Our normal homemade teriyaki sauce is equal parts soy sauce, rice wine, and honey and/or maple syrup, with garlic and ginger powders and sesame seeds to taste. However, our local Asian grocery carries an extra-fermented soy sauce and a “mirin sweet cooking seasoning” that, combined together with a little maple syrup and the above spices, makes a killer sauce, eliminating the need for honey. (No, these sauces are in no way local, but, we’re supporting a local small business when we buy them, so I’m okay with that. Moderation in everything, right?)

This meal was a little fiddly, which is why it took a little while in prep time. I made up the tortilla dough and let it rest, then I thawed the pork tenderloin (which didn’t take long; we’re purchased it sliced into thin disks). When it was thawed, it marinated in the sauce for about ten minutes or so. Water went on for the udon, and I started the pork, cooking it on medium in the largest, most shallow skillet we have, and stirring it occasionally (using a large skillet on medium heat meant that some of the sauce caramelized onto the pork, and some just thickened up a bit. Jeff had extra sauce for his noodles and we both had pork that was completely saturated in the sauce, which is what I’d been aiming for.) Meanwhile, when the water was boiling, udon noodles went into it (another purchased item; I’ve tried making homemade udon, and they don’t come out nearly as well as my linguine and lasagne. Yet.) I rolled out the tortillas and got them cooked up, and sliced up a cucumber. We wrapped up pork, noodles, and udon together into the tortillas, and feasted.

The pork came out amazingly well. It was sweet, tender, and coated in the sauce. The whole meal was tasty. I spent a little while in the kitchen, but it was Friday night, and what better else do I have to be doing besides cooking in the kitchen, drinking a beer, and talking to Jeff? :)

Sausage balls are a Southern staple at holidays and other occasions. They’re easy to make, and appeal to many favorite tastes: meat, cheese, and carbs. Most recipes you’ll find online call for Bisquick or other baking mixes, which we don’t keep around anymore, so I used our biscuit recipe as a base for our sausage balls.

- 1 pound bulk sausage, thawed
- 8 ounces of cheese (2 cups) (most recipes you’ll find online call for a higher cheese to meat ratio than this. This recipe is extremely flexible, but I found the balls to be plenty cheesy at 2 cups.)
- 2 cups flour
- 1 tbs sugar
- 3 teaspoons baking powder
- 1 teaspoon salt

Mix everything together. This is a hand-mixing recipe; you’ll have to get in there and squish everything together. A mixing spoon, no matter how strong, isn’t going to cut it. Depending on the fat level in your sausage, the mixture may be a little dry. If that’s the case, add milk a little at a time, until you end up with a moist but not wet dough and everything is holding together pretty well. Form into balls - I aimed for about an inch - and bake in a preheated 400 degree oven for about 30 minutes. I got 34 out of the ingredients listed here (batch cost of $6.00).

Sausage balls freeze fantastically well; after they’re baked, let them cool then pack up in plastic ziplocs or tupperware. You can pull out a couple at a time for snacks and microwave for a minute or so, or pack 4 to 5 as part of a lunch. The batch will disappear before you realize it. :)

Meal: pork goulash and dumplings
Cost: about $3.25 each
Time: 30 minutes prep, 1.5 hours simmering, 15 minutes for the dumplings
Leftovers: a small lunch portion
Local ingredients: pork, butter, milk
Organic ingredients: tomato puree, spices, sugar, onion

I’ve found myself lately, as we faced a 90-degree-plus heat wave (it has since cooled off a bit, thank goodness), craving a hearty, rich stew. There is no accounting for taste buds. Thus, last Thursday we did another new recipe, and another recipe from Simply Recipes: Goulash. We used pork instead of beef and tomato puree instead of paste. Also, I didn’t use quite the quantity of onions specified; Jeff loves the taste of onions but not the texture, so I grated an onion on a box grater and then chopped it up more finely from there. The result was tiny bits of onion that disintegrated into the sauce and tasted delicious. I made a half a batch, which was enough for 2 generous dinner portions and 1 small lunch portion the next day.

Jeff’s only quibble with the recipe is that the dumplings soaked up a lot of the sauce; he loves sauce. However, he’s not normally big on dumplings, but loved these - they were light and fluffy, not heavy as dumplings often are. If you like sauce, you may want to make more to account for the dumplings soaking it up. Otherwise, this was something new and very tasty, and the recipe was every bit as good as it looked. We’ll be doing this again.

Meal: marinated pork tenderloin, roast potatoes
Cost per person: $2.25
Time: about 45 minutes, of which only about 15 was active
Leftovers: none
Local ingredients: pork, potatoes, cucumbers, bell pepper
Organic ingredients: sugar, lime juice, Worchestshire, soy sauce, lettuce

One of the things I’ve always envied in other people who cook is their ability to go into the kitchen and make things without a recipe. Well, last night I managed that, and it was rather tasty (well, except for the burned sauce, but we’re not going to talk about that.) I wanted a marinade for the pork tenderloin we had, and we didn’t have enough of anything for the recipes that I was finding, so I decided to throw something together.

- 2 tablespoons brown sugar
- about 1 tbs soy sauce (would have been more, but we ran out)
- about 1 tbs Worchestshire
- about 1/2 tbs olive oil
- about 2 tbs lime juice
- squirt of lemon juice (about 1/2 tbs)
- about a quarter of a cup of chicken broth
- ground ginger to taste
- chipotle powder to taste

I mixed it all up and marinated the pork tenderloins in it (we’d gotten three-fourths of a pound total from our eggs-and-sausage farmers, and it was split into 4 smaller pieces, so I was able to pull two out, leaving two for another night) in the fridge while the potatoes cooked, about half an hour. The tenderloins came out of the fridge and were cooked in a skillet on medium for about 15 minutes (but, as already mentioned, 10 would have sufficed.) While the pork was marinating and the potatoes cooking, I threw together teensy side salads with organic lettuce (we missed our local lettuce guy this past weekend), a local yellow bell pepper, and a local cucumber, and some bottled caesar dressing.

The pork was sweet and tender and tasty, and we’ll be trying this again, sans the burning.

Tonight is Mashed Potatoes and Meatballs. Good eating. :)

honey pork

Meal: Honey Glazed Pork Tenderloin, wild rice
Cooking time: about 1.25 hours, mostly hands off
Cost per person: about $2.50
Local ingredients: pork, honey
Leftovers: a lunch sized portion of rice and pork

Last night was new recipe night. We did Honey Glazed Pork Tenderloin, and it was really good. I cut the sauce in half because we had half the meat (half of a 1.5 pound roast; the other half is in the freezer for another week), but we could have used twice the sauce, it was that good. Jeff also loves sauces in general, so. I followed the recipe exactly, which is pretty unusual for me. It was accompanied by wild rice (twice as much water as rice, bring to a boil, reduce the heat, let simmer 40 to 45 minutes.) The only thing I would do differently when making this again is, as I said, make more sauce, and start earlier (we didn’t eat until almost quarter of nine, because of my bad timing.) This was an easy recipe, if a little fiddly, since you’re having to pop into the kitchen every 15 minutes, but it made for a good time to catch up on blog posts. :) The sweetness of the sauce perfectly fit the pork, and it came out tender but not falling apart. We’ll make this again.

I’d also like to note that I’m fighting off a powerful craving for cold Chinese barbequed pork now.