*** Balsamic Roasted Pork Tenderloin

Rating: AMAZING! MAKE IT AGAIN!

---

This recipe is from the book Robin Miller’s Quick Fix Meals.

This meal surpassed all of my expectations. Not only was it easy to make, it was also to the liking of my loving husband, Brian. I would definitely make this again. Now, it did take some time to make. In summary, it took me about 30 min to prepare, and then another 30 min for the pork to roast. So technically, I just prepared for 30 min, and cleaned up with the rest of the time, basting every 15 min. Not too bad for such a fancy-looking meal!

Here’s the deal with this one: in Robin’s book, she has a section called “One Recipe, MORPH IT: Many Meals,” where she makes you make one main dish, and then use the left overs to make other awesome recipes. This was the MAIN dish of one of the Morph recipes. Here’s how this one goes:

1. Main Recipe: Balsamic Roasted Pork Tenderloin
2. Wonton Soup
3. Pork Fried Rice
4. Pork Sloppy Joes

I will make the other recipes as well and let you know how it goes in different entries. This one is about the Main Recipe.

Our delicious meal

The Finished Product

Two 1-pounders

Balsamic Roasted Pork Tenderloin
Quick Fix Meals by Robin Miller
My comments in blue

Serves 4 It served 2 immediately, and I saved 2 more portions in tupperwares for the week

Timing
Prep time: 5 minutes Maybe in Jupiter minutes! It took me a good 30 min to prepare
Walk-away time: 45 min It was actually 30 minutes for me
Resting time: 10 minutes

Ingredients
Cooking spray
Two 2-pound pork tenderloins, trimmed of silverskin if necessary (see Prep Pointer on page 45) Page 45 basically says to remove any white fat and the thin membrane around the meat. Here’s another note about the tenderloins: they come 2 per pack! (or maybe it’s one folded in half?), and I didn’t know this when I bought it, which actually did end up working out for the best. I bought 2 packages, weighing around 2lbs each. I got home and noticed there were 2 per pack, weighing about 1lb each. So what I did was cook all of them in the indicated way (using 2 cooking sheets and putting two 1-pounders in each). We ate one of the 1-pounders for dinner, then I sliced up the second 1-pounder for left overs, and the other 2 1-pounders I ended up shredding and dicing, respectively, for the other Morph recipes. I like it this way better than having bought 1 package that weighed 4 pounds. It’s done faster in the oven my way anyway.
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
2 tablespoons honey FYI, 1 tablespoon = 3 teaspoons
2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
2 teaspoons chopped freshly thyme

Directions
Preheat the oven to 400F.
Coat a shallow roasting pan with cooking spray. Place the pork in the prepared pan and season the top and sides with salt and pepper.
In a small bowl, whisk together the vinegar, honey, mustard, and thyme. Spoon the mixture all over the pork, then roast until an instant-read thermometer inserted into the thickest part reads at least 160F (the pork may still be pink in the center and that’s OK, so long as the temperature is right), about 45 minutes, basting every 15 minutes if possible. A couple of notes: 1) The mixture is the perfect amount for our 4 1-pounders, but it’s not enough for basting, so just baste as much as you can. Don’t just make more mix. 2) I didn’t start taking the temperature until 30 min into it, because I forgot, and it was at 158F. I just waited a few minutes for it to reach 162 or so, and I took them out of the oven. They were PERFECT, even though the balsamic/mustard mix had burnt all around it on the aluminum foil. Don’t let that scare you.
Let the pork stand for 10 minutes before slicing one-third of it crosswise into 1-inch-thick slices. Serve the sliced pork for this meal and refrigerate the leftovers up to 3 days or freeze up to 3 months.

It was lucky we had mashed potatoes in the fridge ready to eat, because Robin’s sidenote in the book says that you can put a few small potatoes in with the pork and they will be ready when the pork is. That is a lie! They were SO hard when I took out the pork, we couldn’t even eat them. Mashed potatoes worked just fine 🙂

After dinner, I went back to the last 2 1-pounders and shredded and diced them up. Put them in tupperwares and will cook them later in the week.

ina