A Fine Friday

The storms were moving in during the evening, so I needed to grill early today.  To make a long story short, I just made it by an hour.  As I type this, it is raining outside.  The Bride wanted salad with blue cheese and some pork as the entree.  What can I say?  She's The Bride, so I obliged.  Specifically, she requested pork tenderloin, but I have already burned through all of Weber's recipes for that cut.  To alleviate that problem, I used a marinade recipe that I had left, the Tequila Orange Marinade on page 50.

The recipe for this is simple.  Put all of the ingredients in a food processor and go to town.  To be honest, I abhor cleaning my food processor, so I went for my stick blender instead.  Cleaning this is a breeze compared to the hulk and bulk of the food processor.

Here is everything put into the neat and easy to clean container.

WHIRRRR!

I acquired a nice pork tenderloin from Findlay Market, and it only needed a little trimming before I put everything into a Ziploc bag for flavor inducing.

For the salad portion of the evening, I chose the Confetti Salad on page 358.  The Bride always likes blue cheese nuggets in her salad (but doesn't really like blue cheese dressing...go figure) and this recipe called for salted ricotta, for which I substituted Danish Blue.

This was my setup:  In the bowl on the left I have my salad.   The large metallic bowl on the right was my compost bowl, as I would have plenty of vegetable matter left over from my prep.

CHOP!  CHOP!  CHOP!

So, you've got a whole lot of salad that needs tossing, and you want to do it quickly and without making too much of a mess?  Here's my solution:  Use another large bowl and make a shaker, like if you were making a cocktail shaker on a large scale.

SHAKE!  SHAKE!  SHAKE!

 

There wasn't anything terribly complicated about the dressing.  I did, however, save the whisking for right before I served dinner.

The tenderloin was on the grill, so I added the blue cheese goodness to the salad.

So much left over marinade...what to do with it?  Make a sauce!  The first thing you will need to do is boil it for several minutes.  This stuff was touching raw pork for a few hours, so you need to ensure that no little single-celled bad guys are hanging around.

After you boil it for a few minutes, remove from the heat, and immediately start stirring in thin pats of butter.  Let the residual heat melt the butter, whisking the whole time.  Taste often, and keep adding the slivers of butter one at a time until you can just barely taste the butter.

The tenderloin looked simply beautiful!  I grilled over direct inferno heat for two minutes per side, and them moved it to indirect heat until the internal temperature reached 155.

While the tenderloin was resting, I whisked the dressing.

As you can see, the marinade, even after four hours, barely penetrated the meat.  I was happy with my decision to make a sauce.

I plated, and The Bride and I dined!

I can sum up my impressions with this fact: I had two full plates of what you see above.  DELICIOUS!  The marinade/sauce was amazing.  The Bride likened it to a mint chimichurri sauce.  As a marinade it is flavorful, but takes quite a bit of time to impart its work.  As a sauce, however, let's just say that it will be repeated in the Bogdan household, and it may even be seen by company once fully modified.  The salad, though, will not be repeated.  It was good, but it wasn't to The Bride's standards.  She severely dislikes raw bell pepper, of which this salad had two cups worth.  Personally, I liked the dressing, as I found it especially bright due to the fresh lemon juice, which I like.  My only problem with this salad is the sheer volume.  This is a wasteful recipe if cooking for two.  Still, overall, this was a pleasant evening.