Unfortunately, there are no pictures for this post, but I’ll do my best job to describe what happened.
The Chef and I collaborated for a dinner over the weekend. We decided to start with a pork tenderloin since I had been craving pork for a few days. We purchased some stuffing, as well as some sweet-tart apples (can’t remember the actual kind of apple) as well as some asparagus and some chopped mushrooms.
Unfortunately, we got all of the products from the store back to my apartment before I remembered that the oven was out and had yet to be repaired by the landlord. Good stuff. Thankfully, I own an electric frying pan (something similar to the picture below) so we decided we could make do.
We made the stuffing (pork stuffing store brand) according to the directions on the box but we made a little tweak to the recipe by chopping up one of the apples we bought and adding it to the stuffing. We mixed all of this together and then tended to the pork.
The pork tenderloin looked something like the picture below:
We took a sharp nice and cut it length-wise, cutting almost until we cut completely through, but with the intent of being able to fold the tenderloin out. By the time all was said and done, we probably cut 80% through the pork loin. The Chef then took the knife and cut gashes into the meat to help with the next step.
We took the stuffing and placed it on the pork tenderloin in the center where we had just made the knife cut and folding the tenderloin back up towards center. The idea was to have the center triangle filling with stuffing and surrounded by pork. We secured this fold back into place with cooking string that was bought along with the food. We placed the tenderloin and the remainder of stuffing into the electric frying pan at about 325 degrees.
We let the tenderloin cook on the bottom and both sides until it had a nice brown, making sure to stir and flip the stuffing that was directly touching the pan to avoid burning.
The asparagus and mushrooms were cooked in a frying pan on the stove with a little olive oil unless nice and soft and the mushrooms had a nice brown color to them.
The dinner turned out fantastic. I really appreciated the way this was all improvised to a certain extent, but yet it came out tasting gourmet and delicious. I think the total cost for the two of us was something like $10, and we both were able to eat until we were completely full.
