The Greatest Thing About Solar Panel USA Is the Mustard, Most Definitely The Marsala

Pork tenderloin happens a lot around here: it’s cheap, plentiful, looks wonderful in vacuum-sealed packs and is appealing to the boys, especially if you don’t fuck it up. For a while we did the sous-vide thing with it, which is almost foolproof except that the fat layer around the cut goes to waste. We put it on the grill tonight, looking for something simple to grill and take advantage of the waning pleasant weather. Contra sous-vide, there were some less cooked parts (we used a thermometer set to 140 degrees), but holy fucking shit, the meat was legit best pork tenderloin ever. Here’s what happened:

Four hours of marinade of miso, mirin, marsala (a break from the recipes I’d used that used sake; don’t know that there’s much difference, substantively, and we had none of the one open and two of the other in the fridge), rooster sauce, soy sauce, mustard and white pepper. Then in the last two hours or so a rub along these lines (did not use fennel or bay leaves because I wasn’t grinding stuff and mustard I skipped because it was in the first part).

At any rate, this was good, very good, best-pork-tenderloin-of-all-time good.

Too Much Pork Tenderloin + Too Much Lettuce = Pork Tenderloin Salad

The problem with pork tenderloin is that the packages it comes in give you two long logs of loin, and two is usually too much. The question becomes what to do with extra loin. Sandwiches are solid, but there’s not a lot of opportunity to eat sandwiches — or at least we don’t usually eat sandwiches. I’ve used it in pasta, and it’s only OK. Then I found this The Splendid Table Grilled Pork Tenderloin Salad recipe and sort of tweaked it so it became useful.

I should back up slightly.

The problem with community-supported agriculture is that you get so much fucking lettuce. We don’t really eat or even like salads, so it’s sort of deflating to get so much really wonderful lettuce every goddamn week. Of course I feel compelled to use it, and this year I’ve at least started out really determined to use all the lettuce we get. Thus the pork tenderloin salad.

The great thing about leftover pork is that you don’t have to bother grilling pork, like this recipe calls for. And the great thing about leftover ginger-scallion sauce (I first learned about and continue to refer to the recipe in David Chang’s Momofuku book, which Martha Stewart graciously reprints here) is that you can use it instead of the vinaigrette-y dressing in the recipe above.

So anyway, pork tenderloin, red potatoes, some fucking goddamn CSA lettuce, CSA sugar snap peas (but could have been anything probably), that ginger-scallion sauce and cheddar cheese. A word about cheddar cheese: the recipe above calls for blue cheese or some such so given that I didn’t use the original dressing, I googled it and cheddar goes with both ginger and scallion, so I figured it would probably work with ginger-scallion sauce, right?

I can report that this tasted good.