Week 4 - FINALLY - Monday's pork

Yikes! We were really disciplined about cooking at home 5 nights a week for the first three weeks, then week 4 totally fell apart, and it wasn't entirely easy getting back to it this past week. But we did cook 3 of the 5 meals (so far), so catching up.

Monday was supposed to be a pork dish, with Tuesday salmon. I hate salmon. Plus, unless it is wild caught, it's possibly the worst environmental choice out there - I know waaaay too much about salmon farming. I don't really know all that much about shrimp farming so it's easy to just pretend it's not a big deal, but I know far too much about salmon farming. My friends: don't eat farmed salmon. It is bad news. So, when good friends came into town Monday night (who happen to work on farmed salmon issues!), it was easy to shelve this, go out to dinner, and restart cooking on Tuesday night. So, Tuesday we had Roasted Pork with Polenta.

Was the recipe easy to follow?
It was - fast and easy. The polenta got a little lumpy, but was still good.

Adjustments?
I bought boneless pork medallions instead of chops, due to availability at our store. Also ,this needed an additional vegetable.

Did it taste good?
Eh. The pork was not great. I think I just have ot say that meat needs to be marinaded. It just needed more. Maybe the medallions needed more flavor than chops would have? Dunno.

Kid friendly?
They liked it, and even ate some polenta. We eat grits fairly often for breakfast, and usually make cheese grits. One of the secrets to good cheese grits is a couple of dashes of garlic salt or garlic powder, so I wish I had added some to the polenta.

Would we make it again?
Hmm. I don't know. It was easy, but it just needed something else. I guess I would say it was kind of fine, but didn't really have anything that made us excited. I have a lot of polenta left over, though, so maybe we'll give it another whirl with just a little more added to the recipe. What else could we add to the tomatoes? Olives. Maybe artichoke hearts? Capers. And of course marinade the pork in criollo, or heck this would be fine with chicken (which of course had been marinaded first). And I'm not sure gruyere ($$) is really needed for the polenta - it would be just as good with parmesan polenta, or what we do with grits is throw in a variety of cheese. Hmm, now that I'm thinking about it, this could become a staple with a few changes.

For those keeping track, the Tuesday recipe was Salmon with Potato Salad. Again, buy wild salmon - wild salmon from Alaska is actually a great choice. Or, a decent substitution for salmon might be arctic char, which some people (including Rich) think has more flavor than farmed (aka Atlantic) salmon.