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.





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. ^_^





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.) ^_^