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.)
