Tressed to Kill

Tonight's dinner is brought to you by the letter P, for pork and polenta!

Since we have apples from the CSA, and pork tenderloin was on sale this week, it was a match made in heaven.  We've experimented before with a recipe for pork chops stuffed with apples, hazelnuts and blue cheese, so we made a few tweaks, substituting in walnuts rather than hazelnuts, and rolling it all up into a pork tenderloin.

I got to work chopping up 2 gold rush apples and toasting the walnuts.  We seasoned the pork with salt, pepper, and chopped rosemary.  Then we stuffed it with the apples and walnuts.  Our blue cheese is currently MIA, so we had to forgo the cheese.

 Justin had the pleasure of tressing the pork and making sure all the apples and walnuts stayed up inside the pork.  And since all of the apples didn't fit inside the tenderloin, we just put them in the dish around the pork while it cooked.

For our side dish, we went with a butternut squash polenta gratin.  The bulb of the squash was roasted, while the neck was just peeled and sliced.  While the squash roasted we whipped up the polenta.

The roasted squash was added to the polenta, along with a bunch of parmesan cheese.

I only had a loaf pan, so we made layers of polenta and sliced squash.  This was all topped with more cheese, some black truffle oil, and truffle salt.  Then we popped it into the oven with the pork to cook.  About 30 minutes later, dinner was ready!

The pork was perfectly cooked, the apples added a nice sweetness, and the walnuts had a nice, toasty crunch.  I did miss the tang of the blue cheese though.

With the unseasonably warm weather on the docket for this weekend, we're hoping to fire up the grill, so stay tuned to see what we do with the bison steak and kohlrabi!