Pork, Rolls, & Donuts

Last Sunday we decided to make Honey-Roasted Pork with Greens, a recipe from Bon Appetit May 2002. We've made this pork recipe before. We never make the greens part but we do enjoy the honey-lemon-thyme-coriander flavor of this dish.

It's easy to make, but it does have to marinate for about an hour before roasting. We were busy working on the wedding programs and doing 6-7 loads of laundry so we almost forgot about dinner prep. Fortunately, we remembered around 4:15 pm, checked the recipe, and were relived that it calls for just an hour of marinating.

SP got the 4 lb pork roast settled into a glass dish and rubbed it with salt and pepper while mom read the recipe to me and I made the marinade. Unfortunately, mom made a wee mistake which resulted in the marinade having 3 more tablespoons of olive oil than called for. The ingredients list says 7 tbsp olive oil but only 4 tbsp are supposed to go in the marinade, the other 3 tbsp are supposed to be for sauteing the greens. She was reading from the ingredients list, not the preparation instructions, and realized too late that we added too much olive oil to the honey.

Oh well. Since the olive oil was already mixed with the honey, we decided it'd be OK. Maybe we shouldn't sip wine before reading recipes/measuring ingredients?!A tasty Coppola Chardonnay, which I enjoyed, but I still prefer sauvignon blanc and viognier for white wine.

Anyway, the pork marinated for an hour and then roasted for about 70 minutes at 375 degrees (until our thermometer beeped 150 degrees). We basted it with glaze every 10 minutes or so for the first half hour and we used water instead of chicken broth because we were too lazy to go pull the new chicken broth out of the basement storage area. Here's the pork just out of the oven:We tented the pork roast with foil and let it rest while SP made the veggie. Here's the pork sliced and ready to eat:The pork was very tasty. A yummy honey-lemon-herb taste. Mom liked it, too; this was the first time she's tried this recipe.SP sauteed snap peas in olive oil for our veggie. Yum! These were so nice and crunchy!

Our starch was dinner rolls. SP got 'seedy rolls,' as I call them. I am not a fan of seedy rolls - I like plain rolls, which he didn't know. I teased him that we are about to be married and he doesn't know what kind of roll I like!!! To be fair, we almost never actually buy dinner rolls, but this week we are being a bit lazy due to all the wedding stuff going on!

He also bought pumpernickel rolls. Yum! I love pumpernickel! I was so excited, saying I'd eat the pumpernickel instead of the seedy rolls but then he said that he bought the pumpernickel for himself because it's a brown roll and therefore better/healthier than a white roll. But mom likes pumpernickel a lot, too.So since there were 3 pumpernickel rolls, we decided each person would get one pumpernickel roll. Mom and I ate ours before dinner while watching golf and working on wedding stuff. I got really hungry around 5:30, so I ripped my pumpernickel into pieces and dipped the pieces in a bit of herbed olive oil. My mom cut hers in half and smeared on some Garden Vegetable cream cheese. SP didn't eat his pumpernickel roll yet. He ate a poppy seed roll at dinner. Mom and I split a sesame roll at dinner. All the rolls are tasty, especially dipped in the honey-lemon-water-olive oil-thyme-coriander 'gravy' sauce!Yum!!

No special dessert for this week. We didn't have time to bake last weekend and this coming weekend there will be rehearsal dinner desserts and then wedding cake and cookies so we thought we'd try to not have dessert during the week. Plus my dad arrives Wednesday night and he loves Rita's, so there might be a trip to Rita's in the near future! And I still have some cappuccino meltaway egg left from Easter. Oh - and we bought a huge bag of M&M's at Costco. They are supposed to be for our honeymoon trip, but I put some out in grandma's candy dish, so of course every time we pass by the end table in the living room we swipe a few.

Last week we had a 'special' dessert, special as in something new and rare for us for dessert at home: mini donuts for a dessert.Last week, SP was in The Strip one day and smelled donuts from Peace, Love, and Little Donuts so he bought 3 little donuts. We ate them for dessert. They were good. He got plain donuts, just dusted with powdered sugar, and that's not my favorite donut flavor, but they were pretty good.I'm not going to touch on any of the controversy with this donut place. SP smelled donuts, they smelled good, he likes surprising me with small treats, he bought 3 small donuts for $1.75, we ate them, they were pretty tasty. End of story.We also tried a new cream cheese from Giant Eagle Market District. We ate a lot of salad last week and one day, my mom bought saltines and Giant Eagle Market District Sun Dried Tomato Cream Cheese. We ate the cream cheese on saltines with a Chef's Salad. I like this cream cheese, but I like the cucumber dill flavor better.