A Night of Four Porks (or Four Pork Night)

Tonight was a night to clean out the fridge and the freezer. It just so happens that most of the things in the fridge and freezer happen to be of a pork-related nature. Therefore it was much like an episode of Iron Chef in that I needed to prepare as many pork related items as possible for dinner. The only major difference was that I did not make a ham and shark fin soup which most certainly would have happened on Iron Chef.

In fact, ham was the only pork ingredient that made it through the evening untouched.



I started off by making a salad with the leftover butter lettuce and some shredded kale. I topped it with sliced beets and chopped pistachios. For dressing I made a dressing with some tahini, water, fig spread, ginger preserves, and balsamic vinegar.



For the main course I stuffed some beautiful center cut pork loin with a generous amount of leftover cornbread stuffing from Canadian Thanksgiving that I took out of the freezer.



I had a bag of Brussel sprouts dying a slow death in the crisper so I rendered some bacon, cooked down some garlic and red and yellow onions, and then tossed in the trimmed sprouts. The pan got a little dark so I deglazed it with some apple cider and sprinkled the crispy bacon on top when it was done.



Based on Mark Bittman's recipe I peeled and cut these sweet potatoes into wedges and par-boiled them. Then I topped them with sage leaves and alternately wrapped them with either prosciutto or bacon before roasting them in the oven. I only used the bacon because I didn't have very many prosciutto slices left but we both ended up liking the bacon version much better.

So we had bacon, pork loin, sausage (in the pork stuffing), and prosciutto around the sweet potatoes. I'm not sure if we lose points from our Hanukkah dinner last week. Perhaps it would have been better form to at least wait until Hanukkah was over before having this dinner.

Oh well. Leftovers don't wait.

Mazel tov!