Then a bit of money appears and one can do a little shopping. Never before had I understood the third-world vision of the American grocery store, the Allen Ginsberg vision of its technicolored, lysergic acid plenty until last week when we visited the emporium of detritus and rediscovered the cornucopia of American food distribution. So many shapes and colors! So many textures! Butter leaf lettuce! Gala apples! White button mushrooms! Just looking at the food arrayed under the lights was a filling meal.
After a careful appraisal of the rising costs of food (generic brand pasta at $1.25 per pound, a 25% increase in price from six months ago) we opted for russet potatoes, yellow onions, carrots, dried beans, pearl barley, green cabbage, eggs, and milk. From the shelves of the meat department I managed to scrounge remaindered beef chuck roast, beef spare ribs and pork loin -- none of which was more than $2.99 per pound. Compared to the usurious cost of bacon these days ($5/lb) one would be a fool to pass up a nicely marbled chuck roast or svelte pork loin for nearly half the price.
After a bit of inquiry, it was decided that Ms Vidal preferred a roast pork loin over beef. The next night, after returning from a day of manual labor, tired from my efforts, yet wanting to pour love into my woman's life in the form of food, I prepared the old standby -- Roast Pork Loin in Herbed Salt.
This is a variation on a dish I learned years ago from my mother. It's quick and easy and almost fool proof. In essence, you rub a pork loin in chopped herbs and salt and cook it at 400° for an hour. I believe the original recipe called for sage. I use whatever is handy. Given the enormous rosemary bush in our neighbor's yard, I crushed rosemary with garlic, a bit of lemon juice, butter and kosher salt in a mortar and pestle. As an experiment, I jammed the knife sharpener down the length of the two loins and stuffed the herbed and salted butter into the loin -- envisioning some specie of pork Kiev. That didn't work. The butter melted out and left the herb stuffing a little trop vegetal, but delicious none the less.
The basic recipe is to grind sage, kosher salt and olive oil into a rudimentary pesto and spread that over the loin. Copious amounts of olive oil are a very nice touch if you can afford it. Then fire it into a heated 400° oven for one hour.
For our dinner, I mixed potatoes with garlic, butter and rosemary and cooked them in the same dish as the pork loins. The potatoes came out a little underdone and the water they released accumulated in the casserole, submerging the lower portions of the loins. While it didn't quite have the usual color, the pork was extremely tender and enough of the potatoes were crispy to fill two plates. In the future I'll cook the pork and the potatoes separately.
Normally I serve the roast plain, but to experiment I made a quick sauce for the pork. I mixed Kelchner's hot mustard with added horseradish, James Keller and Son Dundeee Three Fruits Marmalade, and some cheap apricot jam in equal doses and spooned a little glob onto each slice of pork. Hot, sweet, fruity, delicious.
