Pulled Pork Stromboli

Earlier this week, I was a little stumped about what I would be cooking for dinner. My usual Internet and magazine searches weren't yielding any appetizing suggestions. Maybe I was just in a fickle mood. At any rate, I sat down with a blank piece of paper and started brainstorming, putting together strange combinations of food to get the creative juices flowing.

And that's how it happened... Pulled Pork Stromboli. Forgotten what a stromboli is? Check here: http://thebagourmet.blogspot.com/2010/01/leftover-corner-sauce-to-stromboli.html

I guess you could say I'm a fan of mixing culinary styles. Some of my favorite dishes on this blog are BBQ chicken pizza and breakfast quesadillas, after all.

Ingredients:

2 Balls of Prepackaged Pizza Dough

1 Container of Lloyd's Shredded Pork

Sweet Baby Ray's BBQ Sauce

Shredded Cheese (Mexican Blend)

1/2 Onion

1/2 Bell Pepper

Mushrooms

Leftover Corn (optional)

Steps/Analysis:

Dice the onion and pepper and start sauteing over Medium heat. Pull them off the stove when they just start to turn brown. You want to take the raw vegetable edge off of them, but remember that they'll be wrapped in dough and cooked some more in the oven.

Dice the mushrooms as well. There's no need to saute them, though.

Then, sprinkle some flour across the counter and grab a rolling pin. Start rolling out half of the total amount of pizza dough. Try to get a fairly big, rectangular shape.

Once you're there, spoon half of the Lloyd's pork down one side of the length of the rectangle. Then, add the onion, peppers, and mushrooms on top. There was some leftover corn in the kitchen from a previous dinner, so I threw that in too, just for the hell of it. Pour on a little BBQ sauce to help hold everything together and top with a thin layer of shredded cheese.

Next, fold the sides of the dough in towards the center and roll everything up like a giant burrito. Try to seal up the seams as well as you can to avoid leaks - a little olive oil will help if excess flour is preventing a good seal. You can also brush some olive oil over the top of the newly-formed stromboli to encourage browning in the oven.

Finally, carefully transfer this Italian/BBQ monster to a pizza stone or baking dish. Repeat with the second half of your dough to make another, identical stromboli.

Place the stone or pan in a 350 degree oven for about half an hour. When the strombolis are done, let them rest for about 5 minutes to help keep the insides from spilling out when you cut them up.

Serving/Notes:

Despite my best efforts to neatly encapsulate everything, this is quite a messy meal. The end slices of the stromboli are manageable by hand, but the center pieces are best attacked with a knife and fork.

That being said, the effort is well worth it. The pulled pork strombolis were really tasty - kind of like a summer BBQ in every bite. People dove right in. Just check out the aftermath...

Mu Shu Pork Roll Ups

It's been a bit of a lazy summer for the B. A. Gourmet, but let's get back into the swing of things, shall we?

Do you have a hankering for Chinese food too? This week's recipe is a very simple, mu shu-style pork wrap.

Ingredients:

1 Pound of Lean Pork

1 Large Bag of Frozen Stir-Fry Vegetables

Flour Tortillas

Hoisin or Plum Sauce

Steps/Analysis:

Slice your pork into thin, bite-size strips and start them cooking in a large pan with a little olive oil. Add liberal amounts of salt, pepper, and garlic powder. Stir and flip as necessary to prevent the meat from sticking together and encourage even browning.

Once the pork is cooked through and is getting a little crispy, add the frozen vegetables straight to the pan. Stir thoroughly, adding several spoonfuls of the hoisin or plum sauce. Once the vegetables are heated all the way through, kill the heat and take the pan to the table.

Stack the tortillas on a large plate, cover with a paper towel, and microwave for about 30 seconds. This will warm them up and make them a little more pliable during the assembly process.

That's it? Just 3 or 4 steps? Yep, that's it.

Serving/Notes:

To eat, spread a little more sauce onto a tortilla, scoop on meat and veggies, and roll. Make sure to tuck the ends in as you go and try not to overstuff the wrap.

The typical Asian side dishes are welcome at the table. I served my wraps with white rice and edamame (salty soy beans that you may have had as an appetizer at a sushi restaurant; think of them like Japanese beer nuts), both of which are a cinch to cook up. If you look in your supermarket's freezer case, you'll probably find bags of microwaveable edamame that will take all of 5-6 minutes to prepare.

Glazed Pork Tenderloin

Pork tenderloin is a great cut of pig and a pretty frequent meal over at my house. More often than not, we cook it on the barbecue and the end result is always juicy and flavorful.

While flipping through a borrowed copy of Real Simple magazine, I came upon an (oddly enough) really simple recipe for a glazed pork tenderloin with pineapple slaw that caught my eye. The picture put me in a tropical mindset, which seemed like a good enough reason to make it in late May with summer just around the corner.

Ingredients:

2 Pork Tenderloins (1-1 1/2 lbs. each)

6 Tablespoons of Ketchup

3 Tablespoons of Honey

1/2 Teaspoon of Ground Chili Pepper

Steps/Analysis:

In the interest of full disclosure, the recipe that follows is slightly different from the version I discovered in Real Simple. Originally, it called for one pork loin, stating that it would feed four. There are some big meat-eaters in my family and I wasn't sure that would cut it, so I went for two and doubled up the ingredients for the glaze.

Speaking of the glaze, the original recipe called for ground chipotle peppers, specifically. I couldn't find that at my local Shoprite and defaulted to a more standard ground chili pepper. The meal didn't seem to suffer from the substitution.

Now that that's out of the way, let's get cooking! First, combine the ketchup, honey, and ground chili pepper in a small bowl and stir to combine.

Next, start heating a little olive oil in a large, oven safe pan over Medium-High heat. Also, set your oven to 400 degrees.

Get your tenderloins to a cutting board and remove any excess fat that might be on there. Season generously with salt and pepper and carefully arrange them in the pan. Sear each side of the tenderloins for a few minutes, or until a tasty, brown crust starts to form. Once that is accomplished, kill the heat and spread half of the glaze on the meat. Then, throw the entire pan in the oven.

Set your timer for six minutes. At that point, turn the tenderloins over in the pan and continue to cook for another six minutes.

Place the pork on a large platter. Spoon on the remaining glaze and allow the meat to rest for about five minutes before slicing.

Serving/Notes:
This is a really quick recipe. From start to finish, the entire process took me just over half an hour. The finished product was nice and moist. I may have mistakenly skimped on the searing process, though. More crust is more better, so really be patient with it.

Two tenderloins may have been a little much for my family. I'd say you could easily feed 6 people using this recipe. There's nothing wrong with leftovers, though.

Tune in later this week to learn how to make the pineapple slaw!

Breaded Pork Chops - a Comfort Food Classic

As promised, the B.A. Gourmet's break from chicken dishes continues in today's installment. The transition from chicken to pork is fairly simple for beginning chefs. It is, after all 'the other white meat.'

Ingredients:

4-6 Boneless Pork Chops

3 Eggs

Seasoned Italian Bread Crumbs

Steps/Analysis:

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees and crack your eggs into a wide, shallow bowl. Beat the eggs. In a similar bowl, pour in your bread crumbs. Remember that you can always add more crumbs, but once the raw pork touches them they can never be put back.

Next, turn your attention to the chops. They should be about 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick. If yours are thicker than that, you can either pound them with a tenderizer or butterfly cut them open (meaning you slice them width-wise almost all the way through and open them up).

To bread the chops, first drag the chop through the egg. Hold it over the bowl and let any excess run off. Then drag the chop through the bread crumbs. I repeated these steps a second time for each chop, creating a thicker crust, but it's not necessary if you'd rather not.

It's a good idea to designate one hand for dredging in egg and the other for dredging in the bread crumbs. That will help prevent an unmanageable, awkward shell from encasing your hands.

Place the chops in a large baking dish. It seems obvious in hindsight, but remember to grease up the dish in some manner. Otherwise, the breading you so carefully created will tear away from the pork when transitioning to the plate. Bake for approximately 20 minutes. As always, it's a good idea to cut into the thickest chop to judge done-ness. You want the pork to be white throughout, no pink.

Serving Suggestions:

Applesauce is a no-brainer companion for pork chops. If you want to be fancy, sprinkle a little cinnamon over it and stir for a nice, swirling pattern. Potatoes or any other hearty vegetable work well also. Yes, those are the roasted veggies I told you about last week.