Celebrate Saturday: Pork Tenderloin with Blackberry Sauce

Welcome to my annual recipe crush. Each February I choose a theme, and provide one or two recipes each day for the whole month. This year the theme is Weekly Menu Planning. What are the categories, you ask? We have Sunday Special, Meatless Monday, Taco Tuesday, Worldly Wednesday, Thrifty Thursday, Fishy Friday, and Celebrate Saturday.

This dish will make a splash for your special occasion. The medallions of pork look so elegant and sophisticated—even though my pictures don’t look it! We had this with Herbs de Provence roasted baby potatoes and arugula, blueberry, strawberry, blue cheese salad with balsamic vinaigrette. Very yummy!

I doubled this recipe because I wanted to use the extra pork tenderloin and blackberry sauce in sliders at an appetizer party next week.

As is the case with many of these special weekend recipes, this pork tenderloin recipe takes longer, with more steps, than most recipes in this month's collection. However, it’s worth the time for the drama! This recipe comes from The Washington Post.

Blackberry-Bourbon Pork Tenderloin (serves 4)

One 1 1/4-pound pork tenderloin

1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil

1 teaspoon kosher salt

3/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1 1/2 cups fresh blackberries

1/4 cup molasses

1/4 cup ketchup

1 tablespoon plus 1 1/2 teaspoons whole-grain mustard

1 tablespoon red wine vinegar

1 tablespoon Kentucky bourbon (see headnote)

1/2 teaspoon hot sauce

Place a large cast-iron skillet in the oven; preheat to 425 degrees.

Trim off and discard the silver skin from the meat. Rub the oil over the tenderloin, then season with salt and pepper.

Combine the blackberries, molasses, ketchup, mustard, red wine vinegar, bourbon, a pinch of salt and the hot sauce in a blender or food processor; puree until smooth. Strain into a small saucepan, pushing the mixture through with a flexible spatula. Discard the seeds.

Cook the mixture over medium-low heat for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally, until slightly thickened.

Meanwhile, transfer the hot skillet to the stove top; place over medium-high heat. Add the pork tenderloin, sear for 2 minutes all around, then return the skillet to the oven. Roast for about 8 minutes or until an instant-read thermometer inserted into the center of the meat registers 145 degrees.

Transfer the tenderloin to a cutting board and cover loosely with aluminum foil. Let it rest for 5 minutes, then cut it on the diagonal into 1/2-inch slices. Arrange on a platter or plates; spoon the blackberry bourbon sauce over them. Serve warm. 

DH’s Rating: 4 Tongues Up

DH: “This is really good . . .” Me: “I hear hesitation. But . . .?” DH: “Well, I guess I’d have to say I like the orange pork tenderloin I grill more than I like this. This is good, really good. But I like the other one better. Is that okay to say?” 

Roger and wilco! Message received. My other recipe lets the pork marinate in orange marmalade, whiskey, onion, and garlic for a few hours. Then I cook down the marinade (to kill raw meat germs and to thicken) for a sauce. We eat that as lunch time sliders the next week, too.

Intro to February Month-of Recipes

Welcome to my annual recipe crush. Each February I choose a theme, and provide one or two recipes each day for the whole month. It gets exhausting, so that’s why I picked the shortest month!

Each year I go into my file of possible themes for this month and choose one. It was a no-brainer this year. Every family cook—man or woman—whom I know, struggles with putting meal after meal on the table day after day, week after week, and month after month. Me, too!

Working full time and being the main cooker for the family stretches your creativity, right? That’s when it hit me. One way to not just survive but thrive in meal prep is to systematize it. That’s my go-to for most areas of my life, so why not cooking family dinners? This month is inspired by a women’s magazine I used to subscribe to. It had a monthly menu, something new each night, so that, were I to choose to use it, I never had to wonder “What’s for dinner?”

I’d make the grocery list for the week and cooked the foods they described and gave recipes for. Did I do it each night? Nope, but often enough at one period in my life so that the stress of “what’s for dinner ?” was off my plate, so to speak. I carried that on later to planning our camping meals (no Safeway nearby; we had to pack it in) or for extended family/friend visits. Even now, I make weekly menus to take advantage of leftovers and to vary our meals.

What if you had some tried and true recipes that you simply rotated on a regular schedule and added on a focus for each day so nobody has to ask what’s for dinner? This is “Taco Tuesday” or “Fishy Friday.” With one or two recipes from here each day, you’ll have a month of rotatable recipes. And your family will know what to expect.

So here’s the plan. I will provide you with at least one recipe each day in a category. By the end of the month, you can make a calendar for the month of different recipes. With your own family favorites and the inevitable leftovers, I’ll bet you could stretch it to two months.

You might even make one Friday a month, a take-out or order-in dinner. Then, with your plan in front of you, you just cook away each day. By the end of two months, you start over, repeating the recipes from the beginning. That way, with the distance between dishes, your family will never again ask, “Spaghetti again?”

You’ll notice many of the recipes are “thrifty” or “worldly” (ethnic) or “fishy” despite the category I assigned them to on the blog. That means you can move them around to give even more flexibility.

What are the categories, you ask? We have Sunday Special, Meatless Monday, Taco Tuesday, Worldly Wednesday, Thrifty Thursday, Fishy Friday, and Celebrate Saturday.

Come back on the first of February, and we’ll begin our Month-of-Easier Meals. Well, the easier planning of them, anyway. And you know me, they will be easy. I don’t cook hard!

Facebook post: Looking for quick, easy recipe ideas your family will eat? Check out the Month-of-Easier meals by Sharon Arthur Moore at “Parsley, Sage, and Rosemary Time” http://bit.ly/2Dwraep

Twitter post: Looking for quick, easy recipe ideas your family will eat? Check out the Month-of-Easier meals by @ Good2Tweat at “Parsley, Sage, and Rosemary Time” http://bit.ly/2Dwraep