It isn’t often that many of the things in which I’m interested, collide in such a way that easily wraps up into one tidy and squeaky clean post (local food, sustainable farming, garden updates, etc). In our house, the advent of each major familial holiday is spent pouring over cookbooks and old archived blog posts in an effort to come up with plans for the next big meal. Of course, the variables aren’t always that expansive—Thanksgiving is obviously turkey, and Christmas is usually a ham of sorts, but lately Easter has become the experimental holiday. Last year, after reading through a post by Anita at Married…with Dinner, we tried Judy Rodger’s (Zuni Café) Mock Porchetta. This year, again, I decided to go in a different direction.

The River Cottage Meat Book

A few week’s ago I ordered Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage Meat Book. Whittingstall is an acclaimed chef, broadcaster, and writer from the UK who owns and manages the River Cottage, a 41-acre working farm full of sheep, goats, chickens, cattle, and of course, pigs. He has made quite the name for himself in the Nose-to-Tail movement, along with other supporters like Fergus Henderson and even our gents at Feast. Although it is a cookbook of sorts, the main focus of Whittingstall’s tome is that of an apologist, convincing the masses to turn away from buying the intensively-farmed meat found in a majority of our supermarkets across this great nation.

I think it is safe to say that the only reason this intensively farmed meat exists in its current capacity is because of the lack of knowledge in the public sector regarding the animal’s quality of life until slaughter and then, how the meat is treated from the time of death and the point at which that leaking container of cellophane-wrapped nasty finds its way into your shopping basket at the store. If everyone was aware of these goings-on,  we would probably be eating far less meat as a society, but I digress.

What we can do, is seek out and support producers like local favorites Olde World Farms and Jolie Vue Farms, who ARE doing their best to do things the right way. Both of these farms offer a wide variety of free-range heritage pork, chickens, and pasture-raised grass-fed beef. Both are extremely concerned with their animal’s quality of life and the most humane slaughtering procedures available.

Olde World Farms, Stuffed Pork Tenderloins

So Friday afternoon when we were considering what to cook for Easter, I phoned Olde World Farms to make sure she could set aside a couple of pork tenderloins for me. I picked them up Saturday morning at the Bayou City Farmer’s Market and from then, one thing after another just fell into place. I wasn’t planning a specifically local dinner, reminiscent of the Dark Day’s Challenge that Laura, over at (not so) Urban Hennery heads up every Winter, but it turned out similarly. I walked out to the garden and noticed that we had green beans ready for picking, as well as two of our Texas 1015 sweet onions. I thawed out some of that delicious bacon that I made a while back, and began to think about what starch we could do. We wouldn’t have a whole lot of time after church to get things going so I decided on simple baked sweet potatoes topped with a “light” mixture of whipped cream cheese, Worcestershire sauce (love me some tamarind), salt, pepper, and a bit of local honey, topped of course with some of that chopped, crispy bacon. Simple.

Slenderette Green Beans from the Garden

For the green beans, we snapped the ends off and cooked them for five or ten minutes in a huge pot of salted, boiling water until they were just tender. Then, they got a good shocking in an ice bath…brrrrr. While they cooled, we made a paste with brown sugar, salt, minced shallots, and garlic. We made “bundles” with the green beans by lining up 10 or 12, then wrapping and tying them with the bacon—finally topping them with a dollop (<–very technical word) of the brown sugar mixture. I preheated the oven to 350F and placed the green bean bundles in a casserole pan. They baked for 15 minutes or so to caramelize the sugar mixture and crisp up the bacon.

Green Beans & Homemade Bacon

The pork tenderloin got a treatment inspired by Mr. Whittingstall’s recipe for stuffed lamb loin, involving dried apricots, toasted pine nuts, Allspice (instead of cardamom), cumin, and our Texas 1015 sweet onions.

Texas 1015 Garden Onions

Pork Tenderloin
(adapted from The River Cottage Meat Book, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, 2007)

10-12 Dried, Un-sulfured Apricots, Chopped
1/2 cup Raw Pine Nuts
1/2 cup Coarse Breadcrumbs (I used Panko)
1 teaspoon freshly ground allspice
1 teaspoon freshly ground cumin
Salt and Pepper to taste
1 tablespoon olive oil

Preheat oven to 400 D Fahrenheit.

In a skillet, dry-toast the pine nuts until they are golden brown. Then add the oil and lightly ‘fry’ them. I had fat leftover from frying the bacon for the sweet potatoes, so I used that instead of olive oil. Grapeseed oil is also a great substitute. After about three minutes, add the apricots and a little bit of liquid to help them rehydrate. This would be a fantastic time to use a couple of tablespoons of apricot brandy, but water will be perfectly acceptable. After two or three minutes, remove from the heat and transfer to a mixing bowl. Now combine the breadcrumbs, allspice, cumin, salt, and pepper. Taste and adjust seasonings accordingly.

With a sharp knife, make a slit down the middle of the tenderloins, going roughly 3/4 of the way through them. Stuff the apricot/pine nut mixture into the new cavity. With kitchen twine, begin tying the tenderloin together, each piece being spaced about an inch to an inch and a half apart. Place in the oven on a pan and roast at 400 for 15-20 minutes. Then turn the heat down to 350 and continue to roast for another 20-30 minutes.

I don’t like my pork cooked to the point that the FDA feels comfortable. I feel much better undercooking lovingly-raised pork from places like Olde World Farms or Jolie Vue than I would the intensively farmed meat from the super market. The free range stuff has a far, far less likelihood of carrying disease. If though, you don’t have access to the good pigs, I wouldn’t pull it out of the oven until it reaches 160-165d F. Otherwise, its coming out at about 145-150d F.

When it is finished roasting, let it rest for ten or fifteen minutes before carving. Resting the meat can also make or break the end product.

From start to finish the entire meal took just under an hour and a half to prep and complete. Obviously, I’m no professional, but after many holidays when hours upon hours are spent in the kitchen laboring over sauces, or preparations that have 35 ingredients and a dozen different steps, I’m coming to a point where simpler is always better—gives us more time to enjoy family.

It seems so foreign to me and I would think my generation, to have a meal in which almost every element (save those sweet potatoes) came from either the backyard garden or a farm just up the road. I’m sure my grandparents would be getting a good “belly laugh” (as my grandpa called it) at that notion if they were still around. Every meal they ate was based on that concept.