Ad-Hoc Cooking

It was a meal based on me not paying much attention. And it was delicious.

I was under the weather when I woke up on Sunday morning. Since the pandemic started, I get nervous if I exhibit two or more symptoms of anything, and I awoke with a sore throat and sinus congestion. I rested in bed until about 10:30 and then came down to the kitchen to have some herbal tea and fruit juice. With the sore throat, I was reluctant to eat but DW insisted I have some of the oven-baked pancake that she made.

For the rest of the day, neither DW nor I had much energy to do anything, so we binge-watched YouTube videos, gathering information and making notes for our upcoming vacation, later in the year. We ran videos on our family-room TV and we scrolled through other videos on our smartphones.

I often see obscure videos pop up on my YouTube home page, and I sometimes stop scrolling when I see food. So when I saw a slender slab of pork tenderloin on my small screen, I paused.

I never have the volume turned up on my phone. I receive notifications through my smart watch, which vibrates when I have an incoming call, when I receive an e-mail message, or other essential messages (social media notifications are not essential). So when this cooking video started playing, I had no audio.

The subtitles were in German, so I didn't focus on them. It would take me too long to figure out what was being said and I'd miss the visuals of what they were doing. The cook took a butcher's knife and made an incision down the length of the pork, butterflying it. They created a rub using various spices and coated the tenderloin inside and out.

Next, they sliced and sautéed white onions, and my mouth started watering. But when they added white mushrooms, my interest started to wane.

I don't eat fungus.

They also added garlic, so I kept watching. When everything in the pan was cooked, they set it aside and started preparing potatoes for roasting by peeling them and cutting them into wedges. They seasoned the potatoes with what looked like paprika, salt, and pepper, and mixed them with olive oil.

Yum.

They then took the onion and mushroom mixture and placed it in the splayed tenderloin, covering it with what looked to be white cheddar cheese. When it was ready to go, they took several rashers of bacon, laid them next to one another, placed the strip of pork on top, and wrapped the bacon around the pork as they rolled it into a tight log.

When they placed it in the oven, I had seen enough and closed my YouTube app.

DW and I had just purchased some pork tenderloin, the day before, as it was on sale at Farm Boy. We were planning to used it through the week, and I now knew how we were going to prepare it.

We continued looking through YouTube on the TV, watching more of Europe and making notes of the cities we were going to make a priority. And as the afternoon moved on, my cold seemed to improve (I had swallowed several cold and sinus tablets, and had used a significant amount of tissues) and I started to rally as dinnertime approached.

I told DW that I was going to cook the pork tenderloin and that I knew what I was going to do with it.

"Trust me," I said. That made DW leery.

First, I took an onion from our pantry and sliced it thinly. I made her my sous-chef, getting her to caramelize them and then add garlic and spinach until the green leaves were reduced.

While she worked on the onions, I split the tenderloin open and seasoned it only with pepper and a tiny bit of salt. I wasn't going to place a rub on the pork. Not this time. When the onions and spinach mixture was ready, I placed it in the opened strip of tenderloin, I cubed some feta cheese and sprinkled it across the veggie mixture.

I laid out strips of bacon like I had seen and wrapped it around the pork, sealing it all in parchment paper and then tin foil. I placed the roll on a baking sheet and put it in a 400°C oven, setting the timer for 20 minutes.

Next, I cut up some baby potatoes and seasoned them with a Montreal steak spice, mixing it with olive oil. When the 20-minute timer sounded, I added the potatoes to the baking sheet, with the pork tenderloin, and set another timer; this time, for 10 minutes.

When the timer went off, I took the backing sheet out, unwrapped it to expose the tenderloin but still capture the juices, turned the potatoes, and set everything back in the oven for another 20 minutes.

It turned out quite well, though I had to take the potatoes out when the alarm sounded and put the pork back in for another 10 minutes, until the bacon had started to crisp.

In truth, I could have added more salt to the pork, but I would rather have too little and have to add it after than to have added too much from the start. DW loved it, though we agreed that next time, we'd try it with some sort of rub.

I followed no recipe, other than to get a visual of how to split open the tenderloin, how to stuff it, and how to wrap it. Some ingredients were copied, some were omitted, and others were substituted. It was an improvised dinner and it actually worked.

DW said she wanted to add this dish to our repertoire, and that's high praise, indeed!