A Welcome, and Review From the Southern Sister

My name is Katie, and I’m 23 with a passion for quick, healthy, and light cooking.  Some of you may, or may not know that Tatiana is my most favorite and beautiful older sister. In being my big sister, she is allowing me to write in on her blog “It Was A Very Good Meal”. It’s sort of a neat sister-collaboration thing. Anyway,  I currently reside in West Virginia, in one of the Southern most counties, so everything edible here is either A. Fried or B. Cooked with some sort of fat product in it. I mean it, too. Their green beans, though fresh off the trellis, aren’t lightly steamed to a bright green with a slightly firm crunch and served along side a piece of haddock on a plate like we do on the coast. They are cooked to a mushy, baby-food green in a pot of boiling water with hunks of pork “fatback” thrown into the mix, served up with a side of Fried Chicken and mashed potatoes with gravy. If you are lucky enough to not know what fatback is, imagine a chunk of fatty un-cut bacon. That’s basically the idea. Not something you’d want to take place in your veggies; if you’re anything like me.

So, having lived with a girl from West Virginia for my time here thus far, and quickly growing tired of the style of cooking down here (don’t get me wrong, Soul Food is rather good, every once in a while) I started to pick up a few recipes of lighter fare.  I always, always, start a meal with a salad. Much to the dismay of the people I’m cooking for, who would rather not have to choke down greens before the main dish, but, secretly, I’m making them eat healthier. Now, when we go out, I notice fewer “Loaded Cheese Fries” coming to the table, and more “Salad…with lettuce, crutons, and cheese” which isn’t the healthiest, but hey, it’s a step in the right direction.

Anyway, that’s my “Welcome” portion. Now, to get to the actual “Review” section.

The first thing I’m going to write about is actually an oddity for me to make, since I don’t much care for pork products. I like ham, and I like bacon, but I don’t like pork chops, or pork loin. But, in the book “The Man Who Ate Everything” Jeffery Steingarten wrote “No smells or tastes are innately repulsive, I assured myself, and what’s learned can be forgot” and I decided I should at least try to make something with pork in it, as I’m sure Ryan (my main guinea-pig in the world of the kitchen) would more or less be growing tired of chicken or beef soon.

Sweet and sour pork that I found on about.com which I hardly ever use for recipes, but after reviewing some from Alton Brown, and cooks.com, this is the one I settled on.

Cook Time: 1 hour, 20 minutes

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 pounds boneless pork loin, sliced 1/2-inch thick
• 1 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 1 can (20 ounces) pineapple chunks in juice
• 3/4 cup water
• 1/4 cup vinegar
• 1 tablespoon soy sauce
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 tablespoons cornstarch
• 2 tablespoons water
• 1/2 cup thinly sliced onion
• 1 green pepper, cut in thin strips
• 2 cups hot cooked rice
• 

  All the good stuff to make the Sauce

Preparation:

Directions for sweet and sour pork
Cut pork slices into strips about 3 inches long and 1/2 to 1 inch wide. Sauté pork strips in hot oil over medium heat until lightly browned; drain. Drain pineapple; reserve juice. Combine pineapple juice, 3/4 cup water, vinegar, soy sauce, brown sugar, and salt; pour over pork in skillet. Cover and simmer 1 hour, or until meat is tender. In a cup, combine cornstarch and 2 tablespoons water; stir until smooth. Add cornstarch mixture to pork mixture. Cook over low heat, stirring constantly, until mixture is thickened and bubbly. Add pineapple chunks, onion and green pepper.

Just after throwing in the veggies

Cover and simmer sweet and sour pork for 10 minutes longer, or until vegetables are tender. Serve sweet and sour pork over rice.
Sweet and sour pork recipe serves 4 to 6.

Slanted photo, but I was really hungry by this point.

Thoughts, changes, and other random things that happened:

-On a regular day, I feed only two people; myself, and Ryan. So I should have paid attention to the amount of pork I was using. We still had enough to feed another person or two small people after we’d finished eating. I only used 1lb of pork, and even then, I cut up Center-Cut pork chops, since a whole loin would have run up some money I didn’t want to spend on it.

-I don’t really think that you need to simmer the pork for an hour, since it’s mostly cooked from the browning; but it worked, and kept the pork moist.

-Next, I don’t ever use the “Holy Trinity” of veggies (onion, green peppers, and celery) without one of the ingredients, and since this didn’t call for celery, I sliced up two stalks and tossed that in.

-If I were to make this again, I’d use half the amount of pineapple in the can, but all of the juice from the 20 oz. There was more pineapple than pork. The pineapple’s sweetness when warm and covered in the sauce was a strange sweet almost smokey flavor, but the texture alone is what got me. I didn’t care for it very much.

-I ended up being almost short on sauce (I did see that coming, and splashed in a bit more water, corn starch, and vinegar before it was all done) so adjustment will be needed if you like a lot of it on the rice. I also juiced two clementines into the simmering pan.

Overall, I enjoyed this dish very much. I served it over white rice (you’ll need to make about 1 1/2 cups of DRY rice to match the amount of S&S pork), and we had 2% (gag, I’m a skim milk person) milk (Ryan learned that Organic tastes just the same) with it…which I probably would say isn’t a great choice. The tanginess of the sauce and the milk just didn’t match up. Maybe a wine would have gone better. Something dry and fruity like Reisling. The pork was nice a juicey from simmering in the pan, the green peppers added just the right amount of crunch without being fresh from the plant solid. I used vedalia onions, which was a really great choice. I’m going to warn you this, though: don’t over do it on the soy sauce. This isn’t a dish that should be salty, the pork does a nice job with that already.