The Roast is Clear

I’ve said it before and I will undoubtedly say it again. I love food. I love to cook it. I love to eat it. I love to smell it. And, what’s more, I love to look at it.

Very often on cooking shows, the chef will point out just how beautiful the meal looks. They will accent a dish by plopping a sprig of parsley or a rosemary branch or perhaps some basil leaves on the side of the offering, making it aesthetically pleasing.

I understand why they do it. I think that food ought to be pleasing to the eye if it is to be pleasing to the palate. I can’t say that I accent my food with sprigs of anything, but I really love to mix up the colors of the food I make.

I recently made a pork tenderloin. I don’t make pork tenderloin often because it’s simply not one of my favorite foods. Whenever I prepare it, I think it tastes good, and my husband always likes the leftovers between two pieces of bread (of course). Nevertheless, despite it’s relatively affordable price tag, it’s not something I make often.

But what I can get excited about are roasted vegetables. Don’t hate me because I’m a geek. I just like the sweet taste that roasting gives veggies, especially any kind of root vegetable.

I found a recipe for roasted pork tenderloin and potatoes, and got the notion to make it even more interesting by serving it with roasted vegetables. I went to the market and picked out two of my favorite (and what I consider to be the most beautiful) vegetables – brussel sprouts and carrots.

I know, I know. Brussel sprouts. I see all of you turning up your noses right now. But when you roast any vegetable, the sugars are released and even something quite bitter like brussel sprouts becomes sweet and tasty. Especially if you couple them with already-sweet carrots.

Roasted Pork and Potatoes (loosely excerpted from Food Network Magazine)

1-1/2 lbs. small red potatoes, cut in half (or quarters if they’re largish)

1 large handful of brussel sprouts, with the tops cut off and then cut in half

2 large carrots, cut in large pieces

2 T. olive oil

1-2 tsp. fresh thyme, pulled from the twig

Salt and pepper

1 pork tenderloin

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

Toss the potatoes, brussel sprouts, and carrots with the salt and pepper (to taste), thyme, and 1 T. olive oil in a shallow baking dish (I used a 9 X 9 baker). Place in oven and roast until the potatoes are slightly tender, 20 – 30 minutes (it takes slightly longer in our high altitude).

Meanwhile, pat the tenderloin dry, and season with salt and pepper. Heat the remaining olive oil in a skillet over medium high heat. Add the pork and sear on all sides until golden brown.

Once the vegetables are slightly tender, transfer the pork to the baking dish and continue to roast until a thermometer inserted into the center of the pork registers 145 degrees (about 20 minutes more).

Let the pork sit on a cutting board for about five minutes before slicing. Serve with the beautiful roasted vegetables. I also served a side of applesauce, just to celebrate the beginning of fall.

By the way, if you simply can't abide the thought of eating a brussel sprout (perhaps your mother made you eat them as a child and you said you would never do so when you had your own home!), you can choose any vegetable you like. In fact, the recipe from which I adapted my meal actually called for red pepper and potatoes. Use your imagination.  

But make it pretty.

Dough a Dear

A few years ago, when Krispy Kreme finally made its way out west and the first one opened in the Denver metro area, there was literally a line of cars several blocks long for the drive-through window for over a month. People eagerly sought that sugary piece of dough, and they would purchase the glazed doughnuts by the dozens.

That enthusiasm has waned over the years, and now you can walk right up to the counter to get your doughnut without a wait. Maybe folks are more health conscious, or maybe they simply buy their doughnuts at the supermarket, where they are less expensive.

Being the child of a baker, doughnuts were available to me whenever I wanted one. People used to ask me if I got sick of doughnuts. The answer is, no. To this day, there is nothing that tastes better to me than a fresh doughnut. Every so often, my husband and I will treat ourselves after church on Sunday. I always choose the lemon filled glazed bismarck.

I must admit, however, that despite being parented by a professional baker, and despite so loving these doughy treats, I have never made a yeast doughnut from scratch. I can’t really say why. Maybe I just know they would never taste as good as my dad’s.

But that isn’t to say that I have never fried a doughnut. In fact, recently my 3-year-old granddaughter helped me make perfectly good doughnuts, and she loved every sugary bite.

The secret? Pizza dough. Often I will go to my neighborhood Whole Foods and buy their pizza dough. But since my idea to make doughnuts with little missy was a last minute notion, I simply used the pizza dough that comes in the cans you find in the refrigerated case at your favorite supermarket.

I brought out my trusty cast iron skillet and filled it with about an inch worth of vegetable oil. I turned on the heat on my stove to medium high, and let my candy thermometer tell me when the oil had reached the temperature of 375 degrees.

Meanwhile, I patted the dough out to about a half-inch thickness and gave little missy my biscuit cutter and let her have at it. She needed some help, but surprisingly little. Since I wanted my doughnuts to have holes, and since I don’t own a doughnut cutter, I simply took the lid from a bottle of water and used it to cut out the hole (which I also fried).

It only takes a minute or so on each side to become golden brown. Once they were browned on both sides, I let them drain on paper towels for a minute or so, and then rolled them in a mixture of sugar and cinnamon. I considered also making a chocolaty glaze out of Nutella and heavy cream, but went for simple.

It only makes about a dozen, and Krispy Kreme doesn’t have to worry about competition, but nevertheless, the doughnuts were sweet and yummy and little missy and I both got a kick out of eating our hot treats, making sure to lick our sugary fingers after.

Sloppin' it up

I’m a summer person. I love the long days and watching the flowers and trees bloom. I love watching my grandkids swim. I love grilling dinner. I love hot dogs and hamburgers drenched in ketchup and mustard and sticky barbecued ribs.

But I have to grudgingly admit that I’m kind of relieved when dusk comes around a bit earlier and it starts to cool down somewhat at night. It’s fun to watch the neighborhood kids walking to school and home again in the afternoon. And, I must admit that I enjoy winter-styled cooking.

There is little that satisfies me more than cooking a tough (and therefore, inexpensive) cut of meat in my enamel and cast-iron Dutch oven at a very low temperature for such a long time that the meat relents and eventually falls off the bone. Scrumptious.

But today I wasn’t in the mood to braise a meal. Instead, I wanted something simple. Sloppy Joes came to mind.

When I cooked for my family when we were all younger, I would simply brown some ground beef and throw in a can of Manwich. It couldn’t have been simpler, and we all loved it.

I mentioned this to my sister this past weekend, and she was aghast. Why don’t you make it from scratch, she wondered. After all, you write a cooking blog.

So true, so this evening I gave it a whirl, and it was a success.

Homemade Sloppy Joes

1 lb. of ground beef (or ½ lb. of ground beef and ½ lb. of ground turkey)

1 yellow onion, chopped

1 clove garlic, minced

¾ c. ketchup

2 T. water

1 tsp. Worcestershire sauce

½ tsp. yellow mustard

½-1 T brown sugar

splash white vinegar

Brown the ground meat until cooked through. Add the onion, and cook until the onions are transparent. Add the minced garlic, and cook for about a minute.

To the meat, add the ketchup, water, Worcestershire sauce, and mustard. Stir to mix. Add ½ to 1 T. brown sugar, enough to make it a bit sweet. To counteract the sweetness a bit, add just a splash of vinegar.

Cook for 20 minutes, and serve over hamburger buns.

I always eat my sloppy joes with pickles, so I opened up a jar of my homemade dills, and enjoyed the nip in the air as we ate on the patio.

Dill with it!

I’m a big fan of the dill pickle. When I was growing up, my mother used to make three-day dill pickles every year just as soon as the tiny pickling cucumbers became available. I still can picture the big green bowl in which she would place the sliced cucumbers that she covered with the mixture of vinegar and salt and dill. She would then put a plate over the pickles, and on top she would put a large can of tomatoes to hold the cucumbers down into the vinegar mix.

We would maybe give the pickles an hour. Before long, we began reaching our fingers under the plate and grabbing a barely-pickled cucumber. They literally never made it to the third day.

For some reason, though I have Mom’s recipe, I’ve never made her three-day dill pickles. It is perhaps because my husband really doesn’t care that much for pickles except to accent his hamburger. I do, however, make and can regular dill pickles, which I mostly give away.

This year, I bought a big bouquet of fresh dill at the farmer’s market for a grand total of two bucks. It was truly beautiful dill. I made my dill pickles, and had probably $1.87 worth of dill remaining. The dill was so beautiful that it broke my heart to think about throwing it away. I put it in a vase, just as I would a bouquet of flowers, and every time I would enter my kitchen, the fresh smell of dill would sweep me back to that Nebraska kitchen with the big green bowl of Mom’s dill pickles.

But what to do with the remaining dill? I was simply frantic to not waste that buck eight-seven. Then it hit me! Dilly beans.

Dilly Beans

2 lbs. fresh green beans, rinsed and trimmed

4 cloves garlic, peeled

4 dried red peppers

8 sprigs fresh dill weed

4 t. salt

2-1/2 c. white vinegar

2-1/2 c. water

Cut green beans to fit inside pint canning jars. Pack the beans into four hot, sterilized pint jars (I used the wide-mouth). Place a clove of garlic, a dried pepper, 1 t. salt, and 2 sprigs dill weed in each jar.

In a saucepan, bring vinegar and water to a boil. Pour over beans in each jar to about ¼ inch from the top.

Fit the jars with lids and rings and process for 10 minutes (I do it 20 minutes because I’m at high altitude) in a boiling water bath.

I used both green beans and yellow wax beans. They are delicious to eat right out of the jar, but they are especially good when placed in a bloody mary!

I recently had a three-year-old eat an entire jar. Minus the bloody mary, of course.