Dinner: Pork Tenderloin Roast

Time for another recipe time! Today its all about dinner.

Last week’s new recipe tryout was for a Pork Loin Roast. We don’t tend to make loin roast, just because they take a long cooking time and we don’t plan our meals that extravagantly, like marinate the day before or whatnot. However, we did buy it so we decided to give it a go. I often find the best recipe book for dinners with cool, fun and quick meals are in my Looneyspoons book and I’ve done a lot of those recipes over here for it, especially in the earlier recipe days. Now I have more choices and Pinterest is always a good place to find all sorts of recipes.

Here we go!

Pork Tenderloin Roast
(‘The Loin King’ from  The Looneyspoons Collection by Janet & Greta Podleski)

Ingredients
Makes 10 servings

Marinade
1/4 cup each brown sugar and ketchup
3 tbsp balsamic vinegar
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp reduced sodium soy sauce
2 tsp minced garlic
1 tsp curry powder, ground coriander and ground ginger
1/2 tsp each salt and freshly ground black pepper

1 boneless pork loin roast (4lbs/1.8kg)

1. Whisk together all marinade ingredients in a medium bowl. Place pork in a large, heavy-duty resealable plastic bag. Add marinade and seal bag. Turn bag several times to coat roast with marinade. Marinate overnight in refrigerator.
2. Preheat oven to 325F. Remove pork from bag and place on a rack set in a shallow roasting pan. Reserve marinade. Roast pork, uncovered, from about 1 hour and 45 minutes to 2 hours. Meat thermometer should read 155F.
3. While roast is cooking, pour reserved marinade into a small saucepan. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to low and simmer for 1 minutes. Brush roast generously with marinade during last 20 minutes of cooking time.
4. Remove roast from oven. Cover loosely with foil and let rest for 10 minutes before slicing.

To be fair, other than the marinating part overnight, making this one was pretty easy. Plus, it helps that this recipe also turned out pretty good. I’m one of those odd people who do love adding ketchup into marinade and liking that tangy taste it gives. Adding onto the fact that the spices are pretty good as well, it loved it a lot. We did end up skipping the bring the reserved marinade to boil in a saucepan (#3 of instructions) mostly because my husband said that the marinade will heat up in the oven. Which I can’t really argue with especially since it all worked out in the end.

Do you like to make roasts? How do you like to make them? What spices do you like using?

Pork Chops in Zesty Barbecue Sauce

Its not exactly baking but I managed to get some cooking in.  I promise baking will go up this week! Its tradition for Valentine’s week and we’re nearing the last week of that.

Saturday night, I gave the choice of what to eat and my boyfriend chose pork chops and he described a sauce that he wanted so I flipped through my cookbooks and found this one in Looneyspoons.  Don’t you just love that book? Because I do! I haven’t had one failed recipe from it yet and thats pretty amazing! 🙂

I promised already in yesterday post that I’d post up the recipe so in case you missed that post, here’s how it turned out!

Pork Chops in Zesty Barbecue Sauce

Of course, it was more of an adaptation from Looneyspoons recipe since this is meant to be done on a grill but I simmered it instead but I used her way to make the sauce. I’ll put their recipe but include the modifications afterwards.

Sauce Ingredients for 4 pork loin chops (I upped some of the sauce portions as I made 6)

1/2 cup ketchup
2 tbsp freshly squeeze lemon juice
2 tbsp molasses
2 tbsp minced shallots
1 1/4 tsp chili powder
1 tsp minced garlic
1 tsp grated lemon zest
1/2 tsp dried rosemary
1/4 tsp freshly ground black pepper

How to do this is pretty straight forward.  I first combined all the sauce ingredients in a bowl and mixed it thoroughly.  Afterwards, I put some olive oil in the pan and then sizzled the pork chops a bit first on both sides before putting in the sauce and lowering the heat to let it simmer with the cover on.

Now for changes.  There are only two small ones.  One was that I removed the chili powder as I can’t take spicy so I don’t own it at home.  Second is that I replaced dried rosemary with Herbes de Provence.  I love using that to replace some types of herbs because it adds a beautiful taste.

I had no idea how this would turn out during the cooking process but we loved it.  Definitely a keeper! It makes a thicker sauce and a bit in the sweet and sour flavor.  I think the lemon really brings out the zesty factor (as expected).  Its just really awesome: simple, easy and relatively quick; my type of cooking. Love it! 🙂

Copabanana Cake!

Originally, the dessert request was for some banana nut bread.  The counter is full of very ripe bananas so it had to be done.  But in the absence of a good banana nut bread recipe, I decided to make some delicious banana cake! Whose in for that?

I got this wonderful recipe from my Looneyspoons Collections called exactly that: Copabanana Cake.  This is a super easy recipe, originally made with chocolate chips, but I replaced it with chopped almonds.

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 cup whole wheat flour

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

1 cup granulated sugar

2 eggs

1/4 cup butter, at room temperature

1 cup mashed ripe banana

1/2 cup light sour cream

1 tsp vanilla

1/2 cup mini semi-sweet chocolate chips (in my case, chopped almonds)

1) Preheat oven to 350F. Spray a 9×13 inch baking pan with cooking spray and set aside.

2) In a medium bowl, combine both flours, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.  Set aside.

3) In a large bowl, beat together sugar, eggs and butter on medium speed of electric mixer.  Add bananas, sour cream and vanilla.  Beat again until smooth.

4) Gradually, add flour mixture to banana mixture, beating after each addition.  Batter will be thick.  Fold in almonds (or chocolate chips).

5) Spoon batter in prepared pan and spread and evenly using a spatula.  Bake for 25 to 28 minutes, or until a wooden pick inserted in center of cake comes out clean.  Cool completely on a wire rack.  Cut into 16 pieces and store in an airtight container.

This is a pretty straightforward recipe.  I didn’t have to change much of the recipe. The only ingredient that I did take out was sour cream.  I can’t eat that so I didn’t even bother to replace it with anything like water, which I usually would do.  However, it didn’t affect it much.  The taste of this cake is really good and the texture is exactly right, not too moist and not too dry. Exactly how I like it! I’m sure you would too!

What’s your favorite banana dessert? Cake, Ice cream, muffins, cupcakes..etc? The choices are unlimited!