Pork Tenderloin In Bacon Shield

The weekend full of gaming is less than two months away. Time to prepare to fill some bellies.

Bacon Wrapped Pork Tenderloin

1 Tenderloin
1 Bacon Shield
1 Dabble of Dry Rub
1 Healthy Drizzle of Maple Syrup

For oven cooking, use a temperature of 375° for around an hour or until the internal temperature of the pork is 145-155 degrees. The test run is on a smoker rather than in an oven. The starting temperature was 325° then lowered to 260-275°

Wrapped, Spiked & Ready

Curious how to weave bacon to wrap your tenderloin or prepare it? The fine folks of Rusted Truck Ranch have this helpful video, which describes the process from start to finish.

After an hour with a nice dose of smoke, the bacon shield is looking delicious. I may salivate excessively for the next hour or so.

1 Hour In

After 2 hours, it looks even better.

Hour Two

The last picture I took before eating was very blurry. Fuzzy picture aside the final product was delicious.

Time Flies when you’re…

April has pretty much flew by this year. Free time has been slim to come by and when it was available, I spent the majority of it gaming rather than writing. Not to mention three different projects I’m currently trying to complete. Swapping from one to the next and then back again isn’t a path to completion. Two are close but the third keeps twisting and changing. The brain keeps coming up with more ideas than my I have time to design and code. What appears to be a final design shifts into something larger and more complex. It appears close for the moment.

Yesterday, the local telco decided I didn’t really need an active line. Somewhere amid other repairs, my phone line got disconnected and out went the internet connection. Trivial to fix but it took 15 hours before they got to the repair. A fair amount of muttering occurred yesterday. Hard to finish coding anything when half the files are inaccessible. Note to self: keep even prototypes committed to the code repository.

Given the time wasted awaiting the DSL repair, I’m just going to spend the afternoon working code and watching a bit of barbecue. One the menu for this evening is stuffed pork loin smoked with freshly cut crab apple. The store had ripe mango available so I’ll glaze it up with mango-jalapeno sauce at the end.

Mark’s Stuffed Pork Loin

1 Pork Loin (as big as you want)
1 Apple
1/2 Onion
3 Celery Stalks
1/2 cup Brown Sugar
1/2 tsp Cinnamon

Dice apple, onion and celery and put into a bowl. Increase or decrease the amount depending on the size of the pork loin. Sprinkle with cinnamon. Add the brown sugar and mix well.

Split the pork loin three quarters of the way along the long side. Fold open. You may want to leave the ends of the pork loin uncut to aid in keeping the stuffing from falling out. Fill the pork loin with the apple/onion/celery mixture. Fold closed. Using cotton cooking string, tie the loin back together. Place strings every couple of inches.

Apply dry rub to tied loin. Refrigerate for 1-2 hours. [I just prepped it and then went to get the smoker going.] Place loin on the smoker and baste every 45 minutes. Cook at 250 degrees for 5-6 hours. Apply glaze for the last 20 minutes of cooking. I’m using apple juice for basting with a jigger of brandy.

Just over an Hour

I better invite some friends for grub tonight. If I don’t, I’ll be eating pork loin for a couple of days.

Gamer Food: Grilled Hot Wings

The chaos monkeys decided I needed a new grill today. Wings were the first thing on the menu.

Neither fast or delivered, a batch of these wings will disappear instantly. I started with the Barbecued Buffalo Wings recipe from Simply Recipes. Grilled at low heat for around 90 minutes. The slow cooking and continual basting bakes in the flavor while mellowing the spice. A last minute coating of the sauce brings back the zest.