Tag Archives: cooking

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.

The wherefors and whyhows of crock pot cooking

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They say diamonds are a girl’s best friend. That may be true, but I’d like to think that the crock pot is a mom’s best friend. You fill it in the morning with ingredients in as short a time as possible, and dinner miraculously appears ready for the table without your having to stand in a kitchen for hours on end. Even better, it’s a great way to make dinner during the summer months without heating up the kitchen.

So, what are the basics of crock pot cooking?

  1. Figure out what types of things you want to make: soups and stews can go in any shape crock pot, but turkey breasts or whole small chickens require oval pots. Even the old faithful, pot roast, can easily fill a round crock pot and perhaps require an oval.
  2. Think about how many people you’re trying to serve with your dishes: 4qt crock pots are perfect for making dishes that run in the 4-6 serving range, but you’ll want to step up to a 5 or 6qt crock pot if you want to make a meal for more (or generate a load of leftovers).
  3. Consider what features you want: simpler crock pots have only three settings (OFF, LOW and HIGH); fancier ones may have a KEEP WARM setting and/or may have a timer to switch from your cooking temp to the warm setting.

Beyond that, it comes down to the basics of what you want to make and how to fit that into your schedule. With perhaps a few exceptions, cooking on LOW should be about twice the amount of time you need to cook on HIGH. So, if you suddenly realize at 2pm that you forgot to start your crock pot (and you’re home, not at work or out), you can probably kick that puppy up to HIGH and let it go until dinnertime.

Cooking times are also usually heavily related to the type of thing you’re cooking. Meats vary wildly (often 6-9hrs for chicken breasts or thighs, 9-11hrs for turkey breasts or whole small chickens, 10-12hrs for large cuts of beef and/or ribs).

What about the safety of cooking meats? Will the crock pot heat evenly? Will my meats dry out or possibly not cook thoroughly?

OK – all good concerns, but the typical cook-the-tar-out-of-it style of crock pot cooking (where you leave something in to braise for anywhere from 6-9+ hours) will generally handle this. You can help things out by defrosting meats before they go into the crock pot. You don’t have to defrost all the way, and some things can be put in as frozen bricks…but doing at least some defrosting can help a ton. In my many years of crock pot cooking, I have yet to run into any kind of illness related to meats being improperly cooked. I can say that meats can dry out, so maintaining an appropriate moisture level is really important. And, as they say, YMMV, so make sure that you see crock pot cooking as experimental. It’s like cooking with any other recipe. Why not add fresh mushrooms? Why not add a little hot sauce?

Consider the crock pot yet another way to shave time less-well-spent off the day if you’re already in a hurry (or just need to keep a meal really low-key). Most of the crock pot recipes I plan to post require less than 15mins of prep time. Honestly, I just don’t have the time to prep things for an hour…at that point, I’d rather just spend the time cooking and get my Julia Child on, if you know what I mean.