Tag Archives: meals

Crock Pot Harvest Pork Tenderloin

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The crock pot really gets going in the fall in our house; once it starts to get chilly out, we often start throwing in the beef stroganoff or some other fairly hearty dish. Trouble is, it’s often really heavy, too. There are times when I just don’t want a crock pot meal that weighs me down. CSA week 1 brought us sweet potatoes, so I decided to make a crock pot that capitalizes on those. Since we got apples, too, adding those into the mix seemed like a logical next step. And let’s toss in the red onion we got, as well! The more the merrier!

This crock pot meal meets most of my typical requirements: easy to prepare, cooks well, and doesn’t break the bank. If your grocery store does BOGO on pork tenderloin (which ours does on a semi-regular basis), consider picking up a couple and then freezing one. It only takes a day or so to thaw out a tenderloin, and you can save money while you eat a tasty dish.

 

Crock Pot Harvest Pork Tenderloin

Welcome to Fall...

 

Prep Time: 10-15min

Cook Time: 6-8hrs on LOW (note: we let ours go for 11hrs and it was FINE)

Serves: 4-5

 

Ingredients

3 decent-sized sweet potatoes (about 1-1/3 lb), washed & chopped into ~1in pieces

2 small or medium macintosh apples, washed, cored & sliced

1 medium or large red onion, peeled & sliced

1-1/2 lb pork tenderloin

1/2 cup apple juice

2 Tb brown sugar

1 Tb cider vinegar

salt and pepper

 

Make it Happen

1. Coat the inside of a 5qt crock pot with non-stick spray.

2. Add the potatoes and onion to the crock pot. Place the pork on the bed of potatoes and onions.

3. Grind or sprinkle a small amount (each) of salt and pepper on top of the pork tenderloin. If using a grinder, a few grinds should do the trick.

4. Pour the apples on top of and around the pork tenderloin.

5. In a bowl, stir to combine the apple juice, brown sugar and cider vinegar. Once combined, pour over top of the items in the crock pot.

6. Cover and cook on LOW for 6-8hrs.

7. When done, remove the pork tenderloin from the crock pot and place on a cutting board to rest for 5-10 minutes.

8. Remove the potatoes, onions and apples and place in a serving bowl; remove the juices and put in a gravy boat or other easy serving vehicle. Slice the pork tenderloin into 1/2 – 3/4in slices, serve with the potato/onion/apple mixture, with sauce over top.

Grilled Scallops with Bruschetta

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Oh Bruschetta. Whoever initially thought up the idea of bruschetta was on a par, intelligence-wise, with the person who thought to put peanut butter and chocolate together. What can you put bruschetta on, you might ask? The answer is: YES. During a stint with Weight Watchers, I learned that bruschetta can be a fantastic topping for baked potatoes – it’s lower in both fat and calories than my usual sour cream topping. Bruschetta on eggs? Yes. Crostini (maybe with a little parmesan on top)? OH MY YES. It’s just a miraculous and incredibly easy thing to make.

For the first week of my Adventures in CSA, I thought that pairing some of the tomatoes (in bruschetta form) with fresh sustainable (!) sea scallops from the grocery store would do the trick. The answer is: most indubitably YES. This was a massive win, and though I didn’t do the grilling (DH handled that task rather nicely), I ran the kitchen and had the stove happily bubbling.

The full dinner that night: Grilled Scallops with Bruschetta, Garlic & Parmesan Couscous, and Glazed Carrots. (Full disclosure: the couscous was the Near East boxed variety…it has high acceptance rates with the kids, but I don’t think adding something boxed diminished the meal in any way.)

Dinner: grilled sea scallops with bruschetta, garlic & parmesan couscous, and glazed carrots

Scallop Dinner. Yummy Yummy.

Can you make this dish with bay scallops? Probably – although I wouldn’t do them on the grill. Bay scallops are small enough that I’d probably just pan fry them instead. Sea scallops, especially the wild ones that are sustainably fished, can be really nicely sized for the grill.

My instructions below are based on the idea that you’re doing these together – so it’s all about timing to get things done at the same time. If you want to make *just* the bruschetta, figure on about 10 min of prep time to cut everything, and then another 10 min of cooking time.

 

Serves: 2-3

Prep: 30 min (marinating the scallops); 10 min (chopping for the bruschetta)

Cook time: 8-10 min (scallops); 10 min (bruschetta)

 

Ingredients: Grilled Scallops

1 lb sea scallops

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

2 Tb lemon juice

 

Ingredients: Bruschetta

1 large slicing tomato, diced

2 medium or large shallots, minced

1-1/2 Tb extra virgin olive oil

2 tsp lemon juice

1 tsp dried parsley

1 tsp dried cilantro

salt and pepper, to taste

 

Make it Happen

1. Rinse the scallops and place in a mixing bowl; add the olive oil and lemon juice noted above for the scallops. Marinate for 30 mins.

2. When you start the grill, start getting the bruschetta in the pan. Start by heating up the olive oil for the bruschetta in a medium non-stick skillet over medium heat. Add the shallots, and stir to coat them with the oil. Continue to let the shallots go on their own for about 1-2 mins.

3. Add the tomatoes to the pan, stir well to combine. Sprinkle or grind salt and pepper onto the mixture and stir again, only adding a small amount. (I use sea salt and black pepper grinders, and I did just a couple grinds of each.)

4. Get the scallops on the grill. Total scallop cook time should probably be about 8-10 minutes, but definitely check them for doneness before removing them from the grill. You’ll need to turn them half-way through cooking, so figure on turning them around the 4th or 5th minute of cooking.

5. Continue to stir the tomato/shallot mixture, looking to see that the amount of moisture released by the tomatoes will first boil and then start to cook off. Add the lemon juice earmarked for the bruschetta, as well as the parsley and cilantro. Stir to combine.

6. Continue to cook until the scallops are done or until the majority of the excess moisture is gone from the pan. Remove from heat.

7. When the scallops come off the grill, top with bruschetta.

My result looked like this:

Grilled Scallops with Bruschetta

So tasty...

The sugar released by the shallots combined with the rich flavor of the CSA tomatoes to make this probably the sweetest bruschetta I’ve ever had. I have made variations on this before, where I added garlic with the shallots, and that adds a nice tang that’s totally worth doing – but we were out of garlic (the horror!!), so I made do. And this definitely worked.

How Meal Planning Saved My Life

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I didn’t used to be in desperate need of structure. I bought food, I made sure that house had enough toilet paper, paper towels and tissues that there’d never be a TRUE emergency, and I figured that I could always go out to get whatever I needed if I was out of something.

And then I had kids.

Suddenly, I was blowing my lid if there was even so much as ONE DISH in the sink. It offended me. It was something that needed to be controlled, so I had to wash that sucker and get it out of my sight.

Since both DH and I work full-time, it’s always difficult trying to manage the dinner schedule. It was actually easier when our DD was a baby – she didn’t eat the same thing we did, so we could prepare whatever we wanted. Once she started eating table food, then it became a race against time: could we manage to get food to the table before she melted down? Not enough parents warn you that melt downs have a domino effect; once the kid melts down – and refuses to calm back down for you – melt downs are catching. Someone snaps at someone else. Snapping is returned. Maybe someone cusses. Dinner goes to hell in a handbasket *quickly* and you can’t even remember how it got that way.

And this is where meal planning came into play. Along with my BFF, the crock pot, planning the week’s meals has made it possible to add back sanity and get things under some semblance of control. By the time we finish grocery shopping on Sunday, our meal plan for the week is DONE. We know what meals will be when, and there’s always some flexibility, so if we need to swap something in/out, we can manage it.

Three simple rules govern our meal planning. In no particular order:

Pick meals that are appropriate for the time available. We often seek out crock pot meals that are 8+hrs in duration, because we can set them up before we leave for work and turn off the crock pot when we get home without expecting (or having) the entrée be a dried out mess.

Set up at least one meal to generate leftovers. Again, this is where the crock pot comes in so handy, since it’s easy to make meals that will last more than one night.

Have a stable of reliable sides and “one-offs”. Sides are those perfect yet somewhat generic accompaniments for entrées (couscous, rice mixes, instant rices, egg noodles, for the starches; frozen veggies in various forms to satisfy vegetable requirements). “One-offs” are meals that we know are really only designed to last for a single night and won’t typically generate leftovers; this covers things like quesadillas, tacos, pastas, etc. When I say having, part of that means knowing what works for you, and the other part is keeping at least a minimal amount in stock at all times, so you can easily substitute a side or a whole meal if your plans are disrupted during the week.

When we write down our grocery list, the upper right-hand corner is devoted to the short list of meals, and we plan things out so that we don’t repeat the same meal two nights in a row. The menu below is fairly typical of our summer meal planning:

Sunday – Grilled fish with fresh corn on the cob

Monday – Crock Pot

Tuesday – One-off, like pasta and garlic bread or another Crock Pot

Wednesday – One-off, like tacos or quesadillas

Thursday – Repeat of Monday

Friday – Grilled hot dogs/burgers/chicken with veggies or repeat of Tuesday (if a crock pot meal)

Saturday – open day; we’ll decide when we get there

The key is to push the uncertainty off to the weekend, when there’s a minimal impact from not knowing what we’re making. When DD was very young, neither of us would get home to start dinner until 6pm, with dinner expected at 6:30pm. The crock pot became a key component in our strategy to get dinner to the table on time; meal planning helped the rest of the way, removing some of the random from the work-week and moving it to the weekend, where it’s less impactful.

I know that meal planning may not work for everybody, but it certainly has helped us get our lives under control and keep the dinner-time meltdowns to a more reasonable level.