Monday, March 08, 2010

Blog Post # 801: A good day in the kitchen --

I love shopping for meat.

I love going to the supermarkets and pretending to know what I'm doing when I tell the guys behind the counter that I would like that particular piece of meat and not the one beside it.

Last week, Johann and I found ourselves in the meat section of SM City and we found a really cute pork loin all ready to be marinated and cooked in the oven.

Never mind that we have never roasted a pork loin before.

Never mind that we don't even have a good marinade recipe.

We went ahead and bought it.

I started looking for some nice (read: easy) roast pork recipes and I was drawn to this one:

Balsamic Roasted Pork Loin on AllRecipes.com

What was most appealing was that it only needed 4 ingredients -- one of which was the pork.

The cook and I (mostly our cook, but I was working hard directing her) made the marinade and poured it over our pork loin and left it to marinade overnight.

I was planning to have it for dinner the next day (yesterday, Sunday) so we preheated our oven at 4pm and left it at gas mark 6 for 10 minutes to get it nice and hot.

We sliced some onions and potatoes (by we, I mean the cook) and placed them on the bottom of our pan.

Then we placed our pork loin on top, reduced our oven temp to gas mark 4 (which is about 350 degrees)
 and set our timers for 30 minutes.

Total cooking time was 1 hour but we checked in every 30 minutes just to see if we were going to have a really good dinner or a really bad one.

At 1 hour, I stuck a knife in the middle (I saw this trick on Martha) to test the temperature of the meat -- I wasn't sure what the right temperature felt like but I knew that our meat could stand a bit more cooking.  We let it go for 20 minutes more.

We actually let it rest for about 20 minutes.

At exactly 6 o'clock, we sliced into the meat and nearly wept at how lovely it turned out.

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We piled the onions and potatoes in with the sliced pork and served it like that.  It was a big pile of yummy fat, tender meat and extras. ^_^

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We will definitely try roasting pork again -- maybe with a different marinade.  (We're thinking of making it Chinese style and marinading it in Char Siu sauce.) ^_^

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