Adventures in eating – the pork tenderloin

Early in December, some friends and I went shopping to Dubai Mall which has two really good forbidden meat stores (stores that sell pork and other Muslim forbidden treats like Cherry Poptarts. I don’t know why or if the Cherry Poptarts are forbidden, but the only place I can find them is in the pork section of the Waitrose Supermarket at the Dubai Mall.) I had recently shipped my Crockpot over so I was looking forward to making pork and sauerkraut for New Year’s dinner.

Oh, my dear departed Crockpot, how I loved thee. I’d had the thing for like twenty years and then I shipped it across the ocean. I set it up (to cook some delicious pork chops I’d bought on the same trip) and it never heated up. I tried different outlets. I tried a different converters. I tried filling it with water and leaving it sit for a whole day unwatched. No dice. So I resigned the Crockpot to the trashman and baked the chops in the oven.

New Year’s Day came and I opened my pork tenderloin which had been safely frozen (in addition to being vacuum sealed) for the past month and I thought, ‘that’s not right.’

My tenderloin smelled distinctly smoked. I cut into it and I studied it and decided that it felt distinctly firm for raw meat. So I tasted it.

Yup, smoked, cooked, done. I hadn’t stuck a fork in it, but the knife I used worked well enough.

Now, the plan was to cook this less than 1lb pork tenderloin, have my traditional pork and sauerkraut dinner and freeze portions for later consumption. I had even walked to the market across the desert for potatoes to mash. (Not as strenuous as it sounds. It’s only about a half a block. Don’t go all Lawrence of Arabia on me.) Since the meat was already done, I didn’t have time to fiddle with mashing the potatoes. so on New Year’s Day I had sliced pork, sauerkraut and a baked potato, leaving me with a lot of pork that I couldn’t refreeze.

So the next day I had pork cubed up in my scrambled eggs with a banana and an orange for breakfast and a pork sandwich with cheese and mustard for lunch and pork with sauerkraut and a baked potato for dinner.

And the next day I had pork cubed up in my scrambled eggs with fruit for breakfast again, but I didn’t want to eat smoked pork for lunch so I had bratwurst, potato chips and a banana for lunch. I was going to variety, don’t you know. For dinner I had popcorn as I was to lazy to cook anything.

The next morning I couldn’t face scrambled eggs again so I fried the end of my bacon and fried the eggs in the grease. For lunch I made mac and cheese and put cubed pork into it with a bit of onion. Of course, when I bought the mac and cheese, I didn’t realize I was getting the family size so now I have oodles of mac and cheese with pork and onion in the fridge. At dinner time I decided to dismember a pomegranate and I ended up with pomegranate juice all over the living room. One of the best things I ever did was buy a hot pink carpet. If pomegranate juice stains a hot pink carpet, does anyone see it? Unlike the tree falling in the forest, I have a conclusive answer to this question. Nope. Then again, you also can’t see the seeds when they fall on the floor either, but that’s an entirely different problem.

Yesterday morning, faced with the stubby end of my pork tenderloin that I wanted so badly a month ago and now wish to never see again, I fried two eggs, sliced the end of the pork, crammed both into a roll with some cheese and ate that for breakfast with another banana and the rest of the pomegranate seeds. Not sure how soon I want to see another banana either.

I still have half a package of hot dogs and 2 brats in the freezer and three servings of mac and cheese in the fridge and I think I’m starting to grow a snout.