Mustard Pork Tenderloin

I've been cooking tons of amazing dinners this week (not counting the fish tacos which I had really high hopes for and which kind of let me down). And I will definitely feature my favorite recipes from this week, but today I need to feature this pork tenderloin I grilled a couple of weeks back. One of the main reasons I need to feature it is because it was amazing and I didn't really have a recipe so I need to forever internalize the ingredients I used to recreate this dish again and again. I love love love pork tenderloin and this recipe does a pretty good job of rivaling my other favorite, balsamic crusted pork tenderloin. I might even like this one better. So.....before my memory fails me.....

This recipe came to fruition because I had purchased two pork tenderloins on a whim that maybe we would have some company over and I would cook them both at one time. But then things got busy, we wound up not having company over, and I had an extra tenderloin and didn't want to have the exact same meal one week later (you can do that with hotdogs and spaghetti, but not with tenderloin). In an effort to go as far from balsamic as possible and off a suggestion of a coworker, I was looking for a mustard based recipe. I got home from work and headed directly over to Annie's Eats for some consultation. This  is the only mustard based pork she had on the site. I probably could have found a more suitable recipe somewhere else, but I was racing the clock and decided to wildly improvise.

For the rub:
Two tablespoons of Dijon Mustard (I actually didn't have dijon at this time and instead used a dill mustard I had recently purchased at a winery....I was insanely excited about the mustard probably in no small part due to the fact that I was unable to consume wine)
One teaspoon of Black Pepper
Two teaspoons of Brown Sugar
A hint of Salt
One teaspoon of Olive Oil

I did not cut the tenderloin into medallions and flatten them and all such nonsense. Pork tenderloin is delicious in its original state and I'm too lazy. But mostly, it's delicious in its original state.

Rub the above rub all over the tenderloin and grill until cooked. If it is winter and you aren't able to grill, I usually brown the tenderloin on the stovetop and then finish cooking in the oven at 400 degrees.

For the sauce I really strayed from the original recipe. Basically I took some butter, some more mustard, a lot of onions and a little bit of dried parsley and cooked them on the stovetop until the onions were carmelized. These onions in mustard sauce were amazing and I kind of wanted to smother this sauce all over everything and eat it on a daily basis. As a last minute addition to the meal I threw some red potatoes in the microwave to eat as baked potatoes on the side, but if I had been planning far enough in advance I would have cut the potatoes into pieces and cooked them in the pan with the mustard and onions.

Mmm. Delicious. Quick and Easy. And its homemade so even with the butter you used to carmelize the onions......no calories (that's a trick I learned from a coworker - anything homemade...no calories.)

Quesadillas with Carmelized Onions, Black Olives, Tomatoes, and Hot Peppers

When you're looking for an absolutely delicious and quick dinner quesadillas are definitely a good route to travel. Last night I was looking for something that fit this bill while also using some of the vegetables in my refrigerator. My refrigerator was running a little low so I used pretty much everything I had.

I started with about half an onion - the road to success is always better paved when onions are carmelized so I sliced it, threw it in a pan with some butter and let the butter and heat work its magic for about 20 minutes.

I used a block of sharp cheddar cheese that I shredded up for the cheese, but any type of cheese would work fine.

Fresh tomatoes are a must in every summer meal.

Aubrey pulled some black olives out of the cupboard and I decided she was probably onto something. (Martin and I used probably a total of ten olives between our two quesadillas - we cut them in half - the remainder of the 16oz can was consumed by Aubrey. That girl loves her olives!)

I had a hot banana pepper that I was planning on using to make some fresh salsa with, but I couldn't resist adding a little heat to our dinner. I am of the thought that hot peppers should be diced very finely so that the heat is well dispersed and in every bite (rather than a huge bite of hot that you can't handle) so I usually throw them in the food processor to avoid having to do tiny dicing on my own.

Tortillas (either flour or corn) are obviously a neccesary element in quesadilla making

And I served this meal with a side of salsa. I would have definitely also served the quesadillas with sour cream or guacamole, but I didn't have either on hand.

The only ingredient that I think really could have propelled this quesadilla to even greater would have been some spinach to throw in the quesadillas. I only had romaine lettuce on hand and didn't think it would work quite as well in the quesadilla.

These are amazing! Obviously, assemble all ingredients grilled cheese sandwich style and cook on a stovetop. I usually butter the outsides of both tortillas to get that nice golden brown crispiness while it toasts on the skillet.

Enjoy!

Portabella Pizzas

Of all the amazing things Martin does (making me laugh uncontrollably being the chief amazing feat) being a homemaker is not one of them. So when I got home from work at 7:53 on Tuesday night, there certainly wasn't dinner waiting for me. In fact, there wasn't even a husband and child waiting for me as they had retreated to my mom's house for dinner in my absense. Knowing dinner at my mom's was probably eaten and put away, I decided to whip myself up something. I had some portabella mushrooms in the refrigerator and I remembered this pin which I found on pinterest a while ago and decided to take a crack a something new. I was too famished to take the time to look up the actualy recipe so I pretty much just based all my decisions off of my knowledge of the word pizza. When I did look up the recipe later - I realized my version varied greatly from the one I had pinned.

This is what I did:

I destemmed the Portabellas.
I poured spaghetti sauce in them.
I topped with shredded mozzarella and diced peppers (peppers were the only other vegetables in my fridge other than brussel sprouts)
I grilled the pizzas until the cheese melted.

Like I mentioned, I got home at 7:53 and by 8:17 I had inhaled two of these, cleaned up the kitchen, and started the dishwasher.

But...if I were making reccomendations, which I obviously am, I would probably follow the original recipe a little closer. The original recipe was less of a pizza and more of pizza type vegetables stuffed in a portabella and topped with cheese. The big advantage to this is the original recipe required you to saute the vegetables until cooked before adding them to the portabellas. This really would have skyrocketed my meal from good to great because my peppers were basically still raw when I ate them on my pizzas. I think if I was really short on vegetables, like if I didn't have tomatoes, I would probably saute my vegetables and then mix with spaghetti sauce before adding in the mushroom.  Either way, I would highly recommend this meal....especially if you're a mushroom lover!

Baked Balsamic Carrots

I was originally going to write a post about my homemade mac and cheese. Because it's amazing. I'm not kidding, Martin actually told me on Sunday night when I made it that this mac and cheese was one of the reasons why he is so glad he married me. Because otherwise he would probably have gone his whole life without knowing how good mac and cheese can be.

And then on Monday:

Me: What do you want for dinner.
Martin: I was planning on having mac and cheese. Thinking about eating the leftovers is pretty much what's been getting me through the day.

and then I could smell fresh noodles boiling in the kitchen

Me: Did you make noodles?
Martin: Ummm....yeah.....why?
Me: Because I can smell them. I thought you were having the leftovers.
Martin: Well I didn't want to eat them all - I wanted to save some for tomorrow so I can enjoy it then too.

....If that's not credibility I don't know what is.

But anyway,

I'm not sharing the mac and cheese recipe here with you today because I realized my recipe is less of a recipe and more of a throw ingredients together with no set proportions. And, I realize I never really give very good guidelines for the amount of each ingredient to add, but I barely have a good grasp on this one myself so I can't even begin to articulate it into words.

Instead I'm going to share the sidedish we had with the mac and cheese. Baked Carrots and Balsamic. The nice thing about these is it really doesn't matter how much or how little of any ingredient you use, so it's really tough to screw it up. I made these from a combination of a bunch of different recipes that I barely glanced over on pinterest. Here goes:

Cut the carrots into pieces. You can see I have some long pieces in the pan but mostly little pieces. That's because I originally began trying to cut the carrot the long way to make "carrot chips" as I had seen somewhere but almost immediately decided I didn't have a steady enough hand to master that type of cut.

Toss the cut carrots in a dish with some olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

Sprinkle a little salt on top.

Bake at 350 for about 20 minutes.

ENJOY!

and ps. I normally HATE cooked carrots, but these have a totally different taste to them than the steamed ones your mom used to try to feed you.

Flat Bread

This was amazing. You can find the original recipe here. Per my usual, I strayed from the original recipe and incorporated what I had on hand, but it was absolutely delicious.

I first took a pizza dough I had made a few days before. You can find my pizza crust recipe here or you can use your own, or you can buy a refrigerated one in the grocery store. The possibilities are endless! (They're actually not endless, there's three).

Spread the pizza dough out on a cookie sheet.

Cover have of the pizza dough in an herb goat cheese.

Fold the pizza dough in half onto itself.

Cover the top with the remaining herb goat cheese.

Top with some parmesan cheese and vegetables (I used tomatoes and onions because that's what I had)

Brush a little olive oil on the top.

Bake at 400 degrees for 22 to 25 minutes.

Cut into slices and serve with warm marinara sauce.

These basically taste like the best breadsticks you will ever have.

Cauliflower Pizza

This is another recipe I found on Pinterest. I've been meaning to make it for a while now and finally got around to it on Tuesday night. For some reason I kept thinking it was going to be really involved and a lot of work, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was neither. Here's the link to the original recipe.

And here's my primitive take on it:

The recipe calls for 1 cup of cooked riced cauliflower. The recipe does a great job making it clear that to rice cauliflower all you have to do is stick in the food processor briefly. It doesn't do a great job explaining that 1 cup of raw cauliflower does not equal 1 cup of cooked cauliflower. I ended up cooking the cauliflower twice and I still feel like I was on the light side of cauliflower. I would probably cook three cups of riced cauliflower next time around.  Also, it;s kind of amazing to me that you can just cook the cauliflower in the microwave with no water.

1 cup of shredded mozzarella for the crust. I didn't really measure this, but just grated about some cheese. I don't think it was quite a cup. Probably more like a half.

1 egg, beaten. I found out that when they say beat an egg, they mean with a whisk and not a paddle.

Some seasonings, garlic...oregano....I'm not really too sharp on the herbs because I completely forgot to add them to my crust mix. I'm sure things would have been better had then been in there, but they weren't and the pizza was still good.

Bread crumbs. I ended up throwing a few bread crumbs in here. I didn't measure....at all. I just thought the mixture was a little too gooey and liquidy so I dumped some in. They worked out really well.

All right, while you were mixing that crust together you preheated the oven to 450 degrees, right?

Spread the crust out onto a pan, spray with a little oil (this supposedly helps browning) and pop in the oven for 15 minutes. Except I got really worried about it burning because it just seemed so thin  so I cooked it for more like 9 minutes.

Pull it out and top with sauce, cheese and toppings.

Pop it back in on broil and cook until cheese melts (3-4 minutes)

If any vegetables need to be cooked they will need to cook seperately, because they aren't in the oven long enough to cook. I didn't want to deal with cooking vegetables seperately so I decided to forgo mushrooms and onions and instead used olives and banana peppers which didn't need cooking.

You'll need to eat this with a fork...but it's really delicious.

Enjoy!

Balsamic Crusted Pork Tenderloin

Everyone should probably plan on making this within the next week; it is absolutely amazing. I could probably have eaten the entire thing by myself but I decided to share with my family. I have always loved pork tenderloin and when I saw this recipe on Pinterest (where would I be without you, pinterest?) I had to make it, pronto.

To Make:

1-2 pork tenderloin

2-3 cloves garlic, minced

2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar

2 tablespoons olive oil

1/2 teaspoon fresh ground pepper

1 teaspoon fresh ground salt

Mix above ingredients together, save the tenderloin.

Rub the paste onto all sides of the tenderloin.

You were heating a little canola oil in a pan while you did that right? Ok good.

Sear all sides of the tenderloin in the hot pan, about four minutes.

Transfer to the oven and make sure any remaining paste is poured all over tenderloin

I really hope you preheated the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

Cook until done, about 20 minutes.

Let sit for ten minutes on the cutting board.

Slice and serve with a side salad and a nice tall glass of milk!

Original recipe found here. via pinterest

Foodie Friday: Fresh Salsa

I'm starting another series called Foodie Friday. Someone recently told me they looked through my blog and was surprised by how few recipes I had posted. For some reason, this really cut me deeply because I have this idea in my head that I have a fairly frequent running rotation of recipes on here. Apparently I don't, but....going forward.....every Friday. I still refer to my blog every single time I make a pizza crust.



When we were in Florida we made fresh salsa almost every day. We averaged a bag of corn chips a day during a stay and I became really really addicted to it by the end. I've always strived for a good fresh salsa blend, but for some reason I have always missed the mark. The recipe Katie and I (mostly Katie) put together in Florida was pure perfection and I wanted I to share it with you.

Roma Tomatoes, chopped into pieces
Onions (we used sweet) chopped into pieces
Jalapeno Pepper (1-2) chopped into very little pieces
Bell Pepper, chopped into pieces
Garlic (optional) 1 clove, minced

....and the crucial ingredient half a Lemon or Lime squeezed and Salt to taste.