Get Porked: Cranberry Pork

I fully intended on showing off the gorgeous crystal chandelier in my daughters bedroom tonight, but I got home late, and then I cooked dinner and then time just got away and I didn't get a chance to get a picture before she went to bed. I thought that I had some already, which I do, but after I looked at them I realized that they were obviously taken on a cell phone and wouldn't show off anything. So I promise to show you tomorrow what I did with the ugly brass chandelier from my formal dining room.

Tonight, I want to share one of my current favorite recipes.

This is one of those recipes where the first time that I was going to make it, I read the instructions from allrecipes and just couldn't believe that it was possible for this to taste good. Buuuut shoooo' 'nuff... it does.


Cranberry Pork

I make everyone I know cook this. From my co-workers to my sister, to the gal at the grocery store Starbucks (true story), everyone hears about this Cranberry Pork. The original recipe called for it to be made in the crock pot, but I rarely listen to directions and wasn't about to start with this pork. Well, to be honest, I just am lazy and didn't get it started in time. What's a slacker supposed to do when she doesn't remember to throw ingredients into the crockpot??

She throws them into the oven.

I have since made it in the crockpot and it was awful. My beloved sauce was so watered down and unrecognizable that I made more in the oven because it just wouldn't have been the same without it. I also have shredded up the pork for pulled pork  sandwiches with the leftovers and can't tell you how much I love it

Tonight, I had the largest pork loin in the world sitting in my kitchen because it was on sale, and I'm not the type of girl to walk away from a sale. I cut it in half and would have cooked it in a log if I hadn't of been a lazy procrastinator who didn't give it enough time to cook. So to try and speed things up, I cut it up into individual chops. Honestly, I'll stick with cooking it up in a log next time. I think that it makes the meat more tender. And it  ilets the sauce get thicker because it has more room in the dish. So I guess you could just get a bigger dish, that would work too :)

Right before I dumped almost half of the French Dressing into a bowl, I remembered that I already had 1/2 of an open bottle in the fridge. So I used that. It was not Walmart brand.

So dump about half of the French Salad Dressing and the Jellied Sauce into a bowl. Trust me. Shhhh... I know, I know. It doesn't sound good. Trust me. I like to use a potato masher to mix it all together and if I have red onions, I'll throw half of a small red onion into the mix.

 

Once you have your sauce all mixed up, it should look like this:

 

If you're keeping your pork loin in a log, just plop it into a cooking dish and put this sauce surrounding it. You don't want to put the sauce on top of the meat because that will take longer to cook. I had a harder time when I cut the meat up into smaller pieces because I just didn't have that much room. I cook it uncovered on 350 for an hour. After about 50 minutes, I'll pull it out and see how my meat is looking. If it's done, I'll grab some of the sauce from the sides and put it on top of the meat. This makes the most amazing BBQ sauce. It's just perfection. Seriously. After I've put the sauce on top, I'll let it cook for about another 10 minutes just to firm the sauce up a little bit. 

Tonight, I had hungry kids and couldn't do that so the sauce wasn't as thick as I like it. I could blame the wine, but I completey forgot to take a picture of the finished dish. Instead I can only show you the small piece of meat that was left over after my husband and kids got a hold of it. 

Cook this. The pork is so moist and just scrumptious. But the sauce. Ooooh the sauce. I always have too much and I can't ever bear to just toss it. It's just that good.

Cranberry Pork

• Pork Loin
• 1/2 red onion(diced)
• 1 can jellied cranberry sauce
• 1/2 container French Salad Dressing 

1. Put Pork Loin in center of baking dish
2. In side bowl, drop jellied log of cranberry, 1/2 French Salad Dressing and 1/2 red onion and mix up with a potato masher. Once all mixed together, place on either side of your meat in the baking dish. 
3. Cook 50 minutes uncovered at 350. Check meat and if it looks like it's done, pull it out and put some of the sauce on top to further thicken the sauce. 
4. Serve and enjoy!!!

 Sidenote: If you look at the picture showing the cranberry can and French Dressing bottle, you can see the new green granite tile counter-top that Kevan is in the process of installing. My beloved husband is so excited that I've asked him to learn how to install granite counter-tops. Because once he learned how to lay hardwood floors, seriously, what can't he tackle. Also, the back-splash showing in that picture is the old one. The new tumbled travertine is going up section by section and is just gorgeous. /sidenote

Sun dried Tomato Artichoke Caper Chicken

So if you're looking for a blah chicken recipe, this ain't it.

We had a friend come into town for the night last night and I wanted to cook up something truly spectacular to make up for the fact that I still can't remember what the bleu cheese recipe that I've been meaning to whip up is. So I searched around on all recipes and found a good starting point and then I embellished.

It wasn't necessarily that I meant to embellish. It was more that I just wasn't paying attention to directions (I rarely do) and ended up just winging it.

Man. It turned out.

I would have taken a picture but that would have entailed using my hands for something other than shoving food into my mouth, and that wouldn't have been polite to my dinner guests.

So here's how it all started......

I grabbed two bowls from the cabinet and cracked an egg into one and dropped some flour, basil, oregano, sea salt and then pepper into the other.

Then I breaded up the chicken. I've heard people say the best way to do that is to just use one hand for the egg part and then one hand for the flour part so that you don't mix the two. That doesn't make sense to me because it seems so much easier to just stick a fork into my breasts and plop them into the egg and then the flour. Easy Peasy.

Then I took those boobs and plopped them into a frying pan. I started off just using Pam but then decided against it and so I dumped a little Extra Virgin Olive Oil in the pan and sauteed them.



Once the chicken breasts were done cooking, I dumped some chicken broth in (literally... I rarely measure), squeezed 1 lemon into the pan also and turned up the stove to get a nice boil going.





At this point I had a knock out-drag down fight with Colton over the other lemon. I won. And by winning, I mean that I didn't end up with lemon squeezed all over my kitchen or nice living room couch. 1 small step for mothers everywhere.

I let the chicken soak in the lemon/broth mixture for about a minute completely by accident because I wasn't thinking clearly. I was supposed to take them out first, but I actually think that by letting them cook for a little while in that juice it really locked in a lot of great flavor and moisture. It's a mistake that I'll make again!!

After about a minute, I took the chicken out of the pot and set it aside. This gave me time to have a couple sips of my beer and strain all of the lemon seeds out of my broth. Then I dropped in a can of drained un-marinated artichoke hearts, sun dried tomatoes and a lot of capers.

I kept that mixture boiling to cook down some of the liquid and started another pot to cook up some campanelle pasta (my all time favorite pasta) because at this point, I realized that this would make an amazing pasta sauce. And as a carb addict, I just can't say no to pasta. It's just not humanely possible. I can quit smoking, but I can not quit carbs. Not even going to try. (This might hinder my size 2 hopes for my Miami trip in May...maybe)

It was at this point that I realized I hadn't put any fresh garlic into my pasta. And considering I had just purchased a 5 gallon bag of garlic (m'kay, maybe not really 5 gallons, but large regardless) to cook with that was just unacceptable. So I smooshed all the fixin's of my sauce over to one side of the frying pan to make some room for some quick garlic. I read on Pioneer Woman that the best way to get a garlic clove out of it's shell is to smash it under some canned goods and I couldn't agree more.

The garlic went right into that empty corner of the pan and cooked up for about a minute and then I mixed it up with the rest of the dish.

Voila. Mix it all together with the pasta. Serve it up with a nice Caesar Salad on the side and some fresh Parmesan cheese and just enjoy.

This is going to be a regular dish in our family because it was fun to make and tasted amazing. I love that there was 1 pan to clean up and then the pasta pot. Super easy. But honestly, one of my favorite things about this dish was that it was super easy to make and it's the type of dish that you can make while you're chasing a child in circles around your house trying to take back a lemon and you don't have to worry about it. I love meals that don't require constant attention.

Here's the simple Breakdown, I promise it's super easy:

Sun dried Tomato Artichoke Caper Chicken
-1 egg
-flour
-basil
-oregano
-sea salt
-pepper
-chicken breasts
-chicken broth
-fresh lemon
-can of artichoke hearts
-sun dried tomato (the ones that are in liquid, not the dried ones)
-fresh garlic clove
-chicken broth
-capers

1. Crack egg into a bowl and beat
2. Mix enough flour to coat your chicken with a couple of shakes of sea salt, pepper, basil, oregano in another bowl.
3. Heat up your frying pan and start dippin the chicken boobs.
4. Once the chicken is seared on one side, flip over and sear the other side.
5. Add in enough olive oil to slightly coat the bottom of the pan and cook chicken until done.
6. Pour chicken broth into pan until chicken is 1/2 covered, squeeze a lemon in on top and turn up to medium high heat. Let chicken soak while it starts to boil.
7. Set chicken aside and add artichoke hearts, sun dried tomatoes and capers into frying pan. Let the liquid reduce by half.
8. Start boiling the water for your pasta in a pasta pot. Once you have a nice rolling boil, add your pasta in. Cook desired length.
9. Once liquid is reduced, push artichoke, sun dried tomatoes and capers over to one side and throw some fresh garlic to cook in the sauce for about a minute. This gets rid of the strong raw garlic flavor. Once the garlic looks browned, mix sauce all together.
10. Serve it.... Eat it and Weep baby... Eat it and weep.



And I have to say Thank You to my amazing friend Kat for doing the dishes!!!

Chicken Taco Quesadilla

I'm exhausted tonight after all of the heavy eating yesterday. It takes some serious effort and willpower to remove yourself from the amazing Chili Cream Cheese dip (scroll down for this recipe) and steer yourself to the veggie platter so that you could graze with a tad bit less guilt.

Plus it doesn't help that I've purchased all of the ingredients for an amazing dinner for about a month now, and then once it comes time to cook said dinner... I can't remember what it was supposed to be.

I know that it involves heavy cream, bleu cheese, onions, chicken, chives but I just can't remember exactly what it was. It's like that annoying name on the tip of your mouth that just hangs out on your tongue for about a month. It will come to me.

But until it does. I've got to improvise.

Going grocery shopping would also help make cooking dinner easier.

But alas, that hasn't happened either. Our fridge is so empty that Kevan was thinking about sending out an S.O.S.

So tonight I went for the easy way out.

Chicken Taco Quesadilla

• Cook up some chicken in a pan and then shred or chop up
• Add some taco seasoning to the chicken and add a little water
• Combine Mexican Cheese, refried beans, black olives and your fabulous Taco Chicken together. I didn't have the energy to make some Mexican Rice but it would have been much better. (Here is the recipe I use for Mexican Rice It happens to be another amazing dish that I made last week. Mexican Lasagne)
• Throw into the microwave for 1 minute per quesadilla to melt the cheese
• Put in a preheated oven set at 350 for 10 minutes until the quesadilla is just the way that you like it. I love it reaaalllly crispy. I like to put tin foil down on the racks and add my quesadilla on top.
• Once your your 'dilla is done cooking, take it out and slice that baby up.
  
• Now it's time for the fixin's. I'm a huge fan of salsa and sour cream combined. It makes me a happy person. So my quesadillas are usually soaked in those. You could probably say that I have Salsa Sour Cream for dinner with a side of Quesadilla.
  

The best part about this meal is that the kids absolutely love it and cleaning up after I'm done cooking is as easy as tossing the tin foil and popping our plates in the dishwasher. Fantastic.


Chili Cream Cheese Dip
This is a really hard one to make, so bear with me. Our friend Candace brought this to the super bore yesterday and it was hard to not just in and start swimming in it.

• Pop the top on a can of store bought chili and drop it into a crockpot
• Toss in 8 oz of cream cheese. I like the Neufunzichichihavenocluewhatit'sreallycalled cheese because it's got less fat in it and still manages to taste good.
  
• stir serve with some chips.