Category: cooking

Jen wasn’t feeling well, so I made dinner tonight in between work things. It worked, but it got me thinking about how much easier life is when you have a pantry of staples you can throw together to make something yummy.

Tonight’s recipe was a Mexican-inspired pork stew. Measurements are going to be difficult, but here’s what I rummaged from the kitchen:

• 2/3 of a frozen pork loin
• 2 big russet potatoes
• 2 medium yellow onions
• 2 glugs of dark soy sauce
• 2 large dried ancho chilis
• 2 cans of Rotel tomatoes and chilis
• 4 cubes of chicken bouillon
• 2 big glugs of white whine
• 4 cloves of minced garlic
• A bunch of random spices like cumin, dried cilantro, onion powder, etc

Aaaaaaand, here’s what I ended up putting together with all of that:

• Chopped up the onions and potatoes
• Soaked the ancho chilis and chicken boullion cubes in 6 cups boiling water for 10 minutes
• Sauteed the onions in some olive oil until they started to brown
• Added the garlic
• Deglazed the Instant Pot with the white wine and let it simmer a bit.
• Added the potatoes, tomatoes and chilis and the pork.
• Poured the liquid and chilis over everything in the Instant Pot, put the lid on, sealed it and turned it on to the Soup setting.

Since the pork loin was frozen when I put it in, I quick released it when it was done, then pulled the pork out and cut it up into cubes. I put the pork back in the Instant Pot for 10 minutes to make sure it was cooked, and then served in a bowl topped with some sour cream.

It was delightful.

All of that to say that making dinner tonight I was struck by how easy it was to throw dinner together because I had the pantry staples to make dinner happen. Having things like dark soy, ancho chilis, canned tomatoes, etc made it possible to make dinner without it being an ordeal. It’s so much fun to have all these “toys” to play with!

So, get yourself some dark soy sauce and dried chilis, then play around!

There was a crazy sale on whole pork tenderloins at the grocery store, so Jen stocked up. We’ve cooked two so far, and I think we have at least four more in the freezer. Tonight’s pork-speriment was to make kabobs out of them… and they were so good, I have to share. Since Brian likes squirting the lemon juice bottle, there had to be citrus involved, and I like things a little spicy, so there was a bit of Cajun seasoning. Here’s what I did.\
h4. Ingredients

* 1 sweet onion (I should have used 2 – I ran out about half-way through assembling everything)

* 2 green bell peppers

* 1 bag tiny “dutch butter” potatoes

* 1 pork tenderloin

* 5 lemons

* 5 limes

* 1 small package of baby portobello mushrooms

* 1 small package of white mushrooms

* 1 pork tenderloin cut up into a billion approximately half-inch cubes (no smaller than that, some of them were much larger – it’s a lot of work, so do what you can – larger than a sugar cube, smaller than a Rubik’s cube).

* salt, pepper, and cajun spices

* 1 quarter cup of olive oil

* 1 quarter cup lemon juice

* 1 quarter cup lime juice

* 1 big ass ziploc bag\
h4. Directions

1. Quarter the lemon and lime and put it into the ziploc bag
2. Combine the lemon and lime juice, salt, pepper, cajun spices, pork cubes and olive oil in the ziploc bag with the lemon and lime wedges and mush them around until they’re all well mixed and looking evenly covered. Seal the bag well and put it in the fridge for a couple hours (I left mine in for 2 hour – just enough time to watch Mythbusters with Brian and then chop up the veggies). I know it sounds like a lot of citrus, but a whole pork tenderloin is a lot of meat.
3. Chop up the onions and green peppers into kabob-appropriate sizes (if the green peppers and onions pieces are too small they’ll split when you try to put them on the skewers).
4. Clean both packages of mushrooms and cut off the end of the stems (leave the bit in the middle – I cut the protruding stem bit to make more room on the skewer).
5. Before you’re ready to start assembling everything, boil the little potatoes for fifteen minutes.
6. Now, assemble your skewers. I usually start with some order to things, but get bored or run out of an ingredient halfway through and start assembling franken-skewers. I ended up with one at the end that was just pork and lemon and lime slices (but, damn was it good), and a couple that were just pork and potatoes.
7. Grill ’em. Mine took about 20 minutes total.
8. Eat ’em.\
   I’d never used potatoes on kabobs before, but they were great. They got a little charred on the outside, but were perfectly done on the inside. The best part was that they really picked up the flavor of whatever was next to them on the skewer. The second best part was not having to make rice or anything else because you had almost all the food groups (except bacon and peanut butter) on a single kabob. The only problem with all the veggies is that sometimes you didn’t get quite enough meat on a kabob… but that was a good excuse to eat more, and I guess we ate more veggies that way.\
   I think we ended up with a good 20 kabobs, including the weird ones at the end. We have plenty of leftovers for tomorrow night… but you can’t have them. They’re too good. That’s why I’m giving you the recipe so you can go make your own.