Creole Dijon Pork Loin and Grilled Peaches

When we were living in Ontario, my girlfriend had fallen in love with a bottled sauce manufactured by Renee's Gourmet. I don't know if their sauces are available outside of Canada but I do know that the Creole Dijon sauce she was so crazy about is not available in New Brunswick. So two bottles of the stuff followed us back into New Brunswick.

To our utter dissapointment, the sauce tasted nothing like we remembered it. Think sweet but with a dijon tang and a balance of creole spices all getting gooey on a barbecued pork tenderloing - which is a wonderful vehicle for sticky and tasty sauces by the way. This sauce tasted like, well, like it came from a bottle. A bottle that came from some manufactury. Maybe I'm too spoiled now but I don't particularly care. Whether it's massed produced or only made for home, it's got to be good or it's not worth the effort. Sorry Renee. But I'll make it myself next time.

The saving grace of our barbecue were the grilled veggies. This is nothing new. I've made it and written about it before. But I've got some techniques now. The mushrooms go on first, gill side down. They've got to be almost completely dehydrated so that they become chewy and really concentrated in their flavour. The zuchinni, on the other hand, musn't be cooked for too long or it get's all limp and watery. It needs to retain it's crunch so it goes on last.

The really cool thing was that in between the mushrooms and the zuchinni I grilled some fresh halved peaches. My girlfriend, like so many other times, looked at me like I was crazy but the end justified the means...or the madness. Grilled fruit is great. Watermelon. Peaches. Lemons. Pineapple. Whatever. It's all great. And it compensates for the icky junk sauce you might buy to slather on your tenderloin.

BBQ Pork Tenderloin

I love pork tenderloin. It’s way cheaper than beef tenderloin and still oh so good. To cook this lean and tender cut on the barbecue is nothing short of heavenly. I mean, good meat + BBQ is always a recipe for success. When we lived in Sudbury I used to buy Renee’s Creole Dijon Sauce and slather that over the tenderloin while it cooked on the barby. It was good. Sweet, sticky, sharp, and really delicious when you take into consideration that it comes from a supermarket bottle. Something that can’t be found when, say, you try to make good Indian food with a jar of Pachuck. For this I just marinated the tenderloin in a Greek-ish marinade. As you would expect, there was tonnes of oregano, garlic, olive oil, a bit of vinegar, etc. It made the tenderloin pretty delicious though I’m always disappointed at how little chicken and pork take on flavours. But at least the marinade tied the meat into our Greek salad and leftover souvlaki pita sandwiches. Nothing fancy. But good.

Marinated Pork Tenderloin with Sweet Potato Purée and Warm Chipotle Salsa

If this recipe sounds fancy that's because it's from the 5th edition of Le Cordon Bleu's Professional Cooking which is basically a textbook for culinary schools. You've got everything in here from the use and care of a chinacap to the basics of broiling and the chemistry of gelatine. It's awesome because you could basically work through this whole book and you'd be a "professionally" trained chef. Now the only problem is is that doing so would cost a fortune because lots of this food doesn't come cheap and all the recipes are written for restaurant portions. Best to pay your tuition and go to a culinary school if that's your bag. But if you're like me, you just want to learn how to cook better so buying a book like this does the trick.

What I was originally looking for was a recipe for Eastern European pork roast with sauerkraut. I don't even know if that's the dish but I'll post it as soon as I've found out. For now we have this South American inspired dish that has the delicious flavour of marinated pork loin, coupled with the sweetness of the sweet potatoes, and all offset with a nice smoky and spicy chipotle salsa. It's obvious that a recipe from Le Cordon Bleu will match flavours properly. Salty. Sweet. Spicy. There's no tart or bitter here but you catch my drift.

The marinade consists of chopped onion, mashed garlic, salt, oregano, cumin, cinnamon, lime juice, olive oil and powdered red New Mexico chiles (I used dried chiles from Mexico but that's what I had on hand...the recipe says that you can also substitute for good old chili powder). As you can see there's nothing magic about this marinade. Just let sit over night, barbecue or roast, and enjoy.

As for the salsa, it's also pretty basic. Roast one garlic clove and 1 lb of plum tomatoes for about 10 minutes, peel, throw into a blender with 2 whole chipotle chiles in adobo (seeded or unseeded depending on how much heat you want), a bit of salt, a bit of adobo sauce, purée and voilà. You could probably add cilantro, onions or other such traditional salsa ingredient but I found this sauce was basic and tasted really nice.

All you have to do once everything is cooked is to cut the tenderloin into medallions, place on top of the roasted and puréeed sweet potatoes, drizzle with salsa and that's it. Delicious. Lean. And lets not forget spicy.

But if you're not a health nut, you can use the leftover tenderloin and salsa with some smoky cheddar all baked on top of some nachos and you've got another delicious meal that's great with a nice cerveza, a hockey game and some wings.

Pork and Noodle Broth with Prawns

To start, let me put you into the context of my Asian food exposure. I grew up in an isolated lumbering town where everyone was snow white except 1 African-Canadian family who was a doctor and 2 Asian families who owned the Chinese restaurants. No Greeks or Ukrainians or Mexicans or Arabs where I'm from. The first time I saw a black person speak French - which is basically the primary language all over Africa - I was amazed. Shows how much I knew.

Long story short, food was basically limited to the usual Canadian and French Canadian fare. So you can say that I was pleasantly surprised when I made this soup and found that my chopsticks smelled like authentic Asian food. Not to mention that I actually found Kaffir lime leaves at my local Asian food market. I mean, for all of you big city folks living on the American west coast or anyone in a larger city of the world, finding these ingredients might be as common as finding carrots. But when I tasted this soup I got an appreciation for the delicious, not too overwhelming flavours of Asia. This particular soup is supposedly of Vietnamese origin.

Like a good spaghetti sauce, I find soup is always better the day after when it's reheated. The flavours have come together and things are all beautiful and stuff. And your chopsticks can be sniffed for hours afterwards.

Finally, I find following a recipe to the T is not any fun. This one calls for 12 ounces of pork. Do you think I really went out there and measured 12 ounces of pork? No. I cut up the pork tenderloin and stuffed it into the soup. Recipes are made to be altered. But I found that when I was starting to cook that it was better to stick to the recipe. So, rule of thumb, you can depend less and less on recipes as you practice more and more. Like anything, really.

Pork and Noddle Broth with Prawns

350g / 12oz pork tenderloin

225g / 8oz raw shrimp tails

5oz thin egg noodles

1 tbsp vegetable oil

2 tsp sesame oil

4 shallots or 1 medium onion, sliced

1 tbsp finely sliced fresh root ginger

1 garlic clove, crushed

1 tsp sugar

6 1/4 cups chicken stock

2 kaffir lime leaves

3 tbsp Thai fish sauce

juice of 1/2 lime

4 sprigs of fresh cilantro and 2 green onions (scallions) chopped for garnish

1. Remove fat of tenderloin and slice as thinly as possible. A good trick is to put the thawed pork in the freezer for 30 minutes to firm the flesh up. It's then easier to slice thinly.

2. If using raw prawn tails, peel and devein the prawns.

3. Bring a large pan of salted water to the boil and simmer the egg noodles until softened, or according to the instructions on the packet. Drain and refresh under cold running water. Set the noodles to one side.

4. Pre-heat a wok. Add the vegetables and sesame oils and heat through. When the oil is hot, add the shallots or onion and stir-fry for 3-4 minutes, until evenly browned. Remove from the wok and set aside.

5. Add the ginger, garlic, sugar and chicken stock to the wok and bring to a simmer. Add the lime leaves, fish sauce and lime juice. Add the pork, then simmer for 15 minutes.

6. Add the prawns and noodles and simmer for 3-4 minutes, or longer if using raw prawns to ensure that they are cooked. Add the shallots or onion.

7. Serve garnished with cilantro and the green onions.

Definitely a 4 out of 5.

P.S. Sorry the pork looks purple in the photo. My camera sucks. I do not like green eggs and purple pork. I do not like them Sam I...um...Fork?