Stuffing is one of my (and probably everybody else’s) favorite side dishes that you only have once a year with your Thanksgiving turkey. For such a rare treat, you might as well spoil yourself a little:
There seem to be an endless variety of ways you can prepare stuffing–from a bag, from inside the turkey, from fresh cornbread, apples, raisins, celery, squash, chestnut, oyster, cranberry–anything in season is pretty much fair game. This particular recipe was inspired by one that I saw online a while back that sounded delicious and slightly different from what I had grown up on. The end result was amazing: rather than the traditional cornbread croutons, you have the tang of sourdough bread, the heartiness of sausage, the earthy flavor of mushrooms, and the creaminess of leeks and goat cheese. There are a lot of really rich, heavy flavors at play in this stuffing, and it is guaranteed to live up to the high expectations everybody brings to
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Posted by mike on December 1st, 2007 in Pork, Side dish
I thought I’d try a new take on pies as I’ve only really dealt with pies and pastries in dessert form. I stumbled across tourtiere, a traditional French-Canadian meal, and it seemed like a perfect match. This is a pie filled with pork and is commonly served around this time of year, so it seemed like great new thing to try.
I can’t say whether or not the outcome here is as it was supposed to be as I’ve never had a tourtiere before, but I was pretty good about incorporating the core of what I encountered in other versions of this dish, but without any local French-Canadians to give their seal of approval, we’ll have to go on faith on this one.
I was excited when this came out of the oven–I mean its pie and its dinner! I carefully cut out a slice and took a big bite. Texture, moisture, heartiness, and all of those sorts of components were great, but the
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Posted by mike on November 13th, 2007 in Main course, Pie, Pork
I think pork can be a really fun meat to cook with because it goes surprisingly well with fruit, and in this case, pomegranate.
Pomegranate is a curious fruit if you’ve never worked with it. The flavor is kind of hard to describe: sweet but tart, as well as both dark and somewhat tannic (that mouth-drying feeling you get from red wine). Given the history of this fruit, pomegranate can add either a real middle-eastern or Mediterranean flare to a dish, which is just what we’re going for. We’ll rub the pork with a middle-eastern styled dry rub and glaze it with the dark, subtle fruity flavors of pomegranate mixed with the complex sweetness you get from basalmic and fresh rosemary. This is also my entry for this week’s Weekend Herb Blogging, hosted this week by Haalo from Cook (almost) Anything At Least Once.
- 1 lb pork tenderloin
- 2 pomegranates (which is equivalent to roughly 1-1.5 cups of pomegranate juice)
- 1 medium-sized sweet onion
- 4-8
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Posted by mike on October 4th, 2007 in Fruit, Main course, Mediterranean, Pork, Sauce
BTW, I was tagged by Ning of Heart...
