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Family. Pork. Falling Behind.

I have some catching up to do…with crazy amounts of local and out-of-state recruiting along with application review starting up at work, Matt‘s family visiting from NY, nice weather starting to roll in, and other general business, I have gotten way behind in posting yummy food, random news/things from Jezebel that excite me, adorable puppy things and other bits of things.  I am also working from an interim laptop until I get a new one (long story which will probably result in a blog post ranting about the importance of customer service sometime soon), and this machine happens to have Linux on it…it’s all fine for email, Facebook, random interndet needs, but it doesn’t have all the fun blog software I had in Windows.  Once I have a shiny new computer to work on, blogging will become a more regular thing…that might be the 3rd or 4th time I’ve made that claim, so we’ll see.

Moving along…

Matt’s mom and sister were in town for a weekend and it was spectacular! A long weekend full of running around and busy excitement, but we had a great time, were super excited to see them, and I was really glad that they got to spend some quality time bonding with Santana (as if she needed the attention).  She was EXHAUSTED after they left.  I’m sure she’ll blog about it sometime soon. In the meantime, you can see a recap of the weekend, along with some adorable pictures on Dori’s Shiny Blog.

I’m going to try and get caught up with some delicious meals we’ve been experimenting with lately.  Rather than post one massive entry with all of them, I’ll do one at a time, and eventually we’ll be up to speed.

First up, in no particular order, Maple-Glazed Pork with Apples and Roasted Winter Vegetables.  Although I used the pork/apples from this recipe and the veggies from this one, we didn’t completely follow the recipes because we had a random assortment of vegetables (from our CSA!) and couldn’t find apple cider at our Safeway that week.

Carrots, Garnet (or jewel?) Yams, Onions, Beets (all from our CSA box)!! This was my first time making beets and Matt’s first time eating them.  As a kid I always had canned beets as a side with dinner, but I don’t remember being crazy about them.  At Bastyr, they are always available on the salad bar, so I’m getting used to them…they stain everything if you’re not careful…you can see my pink-stained hand after touching the beets just briefly!  I peeled them under running water and cut them quickly and we didn’t have any lasting damage.  I am usually amazed by the bright vibrant colors of fruits and vegetables…look at all the nutrients!!

We bought a new peeler the other day…it has serrated edges and says that it works well on soft fruits and veggies (I think they specifically mention tomatoes).  I haven’t tried it on anything quite that soft yet, but on these veggies and on the apples, the serrated peeler was spectacular! I totally recommend it! It did not work so well on carrots (I use my regular peeler to peel long, thick-ish strips that I cut in half when we make fried rice).

Here are all the veggies ready to be roasted! You can see that the beets have turned everything a little pink along the edges:

Now the pork!! Lightly coated in breadcrumbs (just enough for a crust, no egg wash or anything messy needed), and pan fried over high heat to get the crust brown. Yum!  These were pre-cut thin pork medallions…straight from the store package, they didn’t need any prep work. This is my dream.  I love fresh meat, and I’m really satisfied if I can break down a whole chicken or something, but this made the pork portion of the meal sooo easy.  Plus, they were on sale!

Now the apples! These also came via Full Circle Farm, and we’d had them on hand for a couple weeks, so this was a great opportunity to use them, since they probably weren’t a great choice for eating out of hand.  I have this nifty apple corer/slicer that works much better when the apple is peeled (it doesn’t have the sharpest of edges, which is probably best, considering I end up with a bandaid on at least one of my fingers every week).  So my serrated peeler came in really handy and I made quick work of the apples, getting them right into the pan with browned pork…

This whole meal was really easy, and probably the hardest part was getting all the vegetables peeled and cut (Matt was a big help here!).  This was one of the easiest pork recipes I’ve ever made, and because I had my meat thermometer, I stopped the pork as soon as the thermometer registered it at medium.  It rested while I let the apples cook down and was SO tender and delicious when we ate it.  Matt was stunned.  The maple, mustardy, apple-y, glaze-type sauce that came from the pan was absolutely full of flavor, and it went really well with the roasted veggies.  If I made this again, I’d probably ditch the yams and save those for some other dish.  They got really soft and mushy (the nature of yams), and compared to the beets and carrots it was too much of a contrast for me.  Regular potatoes would have worked nicely, or any other root veg…I think the original recipe uses turnips? We also had a mini salad with some lettuce from our CSA and just some shredded cheese.  Needless to say, we felt super healthy after this meal and it always makes us happy when we can get so much use out of local and/or organic produce that we get specially delivered for us!

More to come soon!

To celebrate Obama, puppies (old and young), hope, progress, love, the luck of still having jobs, and life in general…

Let’s try to get back to blogging regularly!

Happy Birthday!

I missed it yesterday because we were busy running around, having lunch with Saugata, and coming home to see Andrew, but yesterday, March 21st was SANTANA’S BIRTHDAY!!!

She is such a party puppy!!

Out of curiosity, we researched Freckles’s birthday…approximately October 13, 1994…She will be 14 this year!!! So old!!

Also, Happy Birthday to Dori, whose birthday is the same as Santana!!! Yay!!

Make me smile