What Happens in the Kitchen...: Cook the cover...

There was a time in this house a while ago where we were having dinner parties and theme dinners quite regularly and don't get me wrong because they were fabulous and I would entertain all the time if I could but I had my friends spoiled. I had an extremely busy summer between work and weddings and everything else and I would see my friends (yes Jon and Sean, now you know how to get a meal at this house) at different things and they would always bring up these not so subtle, longing hints of "you know Catie, you are really due to throw a party, when is it going to happen?" So of course this got the bug in my ear and Friday night turned into the right night to have a dinner party. Things were starting to really fall into place for the 6 of us who were around, I would take care of the main course, Deanna would bring a salad, Suzanne would be in charge of wine, and Kara had the handle on dessert and we would be in business. I vetoed any idea of appetizers because as Sam Sifton said in his NY Times article recently "Do you really want your guests to fill up on nuts when you are giving them some spectacular main course" and he was right, we sure didn't need any extra food. Since I hadn't cooked in awhile I knew that I had to step it up a notch and being off all day on Friday I thought "Oh this will be great, I will have X amount of hours to stay home and cook and put together this meal at a leisurely place". I decided that we would have a riff on the roasted pork loin from the cover of this month's Bon Appetit, sweet potato gnocchi with sage and chestnuts, and sauteed vegetable bundles that are inspired by my mother's shoestring veggies. Everything else was taken care of and I had to make 3 dishes over the course of an entire afternoon.

Really who was I trying to kid....Friday turned into a day from hell for me. I spent the morning fighting for over an hour with my bank, went for a manicure appointment that I never actually made (at that point, I was just like I'm loosing my mind) and finally when I was about to leave to go home and cook I had a somewhat major issue with my car that needed immediate attention. Note to all: if a dashboard signal on your car is not only blinking and beeping, it's kind of a big deal. Needless to say, I felt like my life was in shambles and all I wanted to do at this point was go home, cover my counter tops in flours and make gnocchi but instead I kept seeing the minutes ticking away in front of me and I was on the verge of panic attacks of how this was all going to get done and kept thinking "Dear God, do not let the theme of today be how this dinner party is going to turn out". But it pays to be loyal to your local, tried and true mechanic who gave me a ride home while he dealt with the car and I was able to concentrate on dinner and not worry about anything else for a few hours and everything worked out fine. I prepared my pork right up until the moment it needed to get roasted, prepped my veggies and made gnocchi at a record pace before anyone even showed up and was able to even enjoy a sparkly fall cocktail with everyone as the meal finished cooking.

And obviously from the fact that not one ounce of food was leftover, I would say it was a big frickin success. By the time dinner was on the table, I wasn't completely exhausted from cooking all day like I've been in the past and got to sit and eat and drink and really visit with my friends. In so many ways it was one of the most ideal and deeply satisfying dinner parties that I've had in a long time, all of the food turned out delicious, we lingered at the table long after dinner was over and even the cleanup wasn't bad at all. Maybe Friday worked out just how it was supposed to regardless of all of the drama that I had throughout the day. Maybe I wasn't supposed to have all of these hours to stay home and cook and overstimulate myself further because really it just shows that in order to make a nice dinner you don't have to be chained to your stove for hours on end? Maybe I was supposed to get stressed out about everything else so by the time dinner rolled around, this would feel like a walk in the park? You can try to fight everything little thing that happens in your life or you can just go with it and know that it's going to turn out how it was meant to be and more often then not it will be on the good side of things. If you asked me this at 2pm when everything was hitting the fan I would have laughed at you but when I was laying in bed that night after everything was over and done with, I wouldn't have traded my dinner and my day for the world.

A Note on the Pork:

At first glance when reading the recipe for the pork, I was overwhelmed just looking at. I'm past the point in my cooking life where I want to make recipes with 22 ingredients and 15 different steps on a regular basis but it looked really good so I knew I was going to have to adapt the recipe to make it more real life conducive. Here is the rundown of my pork tenderloin:
-Instead of using an entire pork loin that I would have to butterfly and roll, I used the thin pork loins and made one deep slit in the center of the pork that I would stuff with my filling.
-As much as all of the ingredients of the BA filling recipe sounded delicious, it was a lot of stuff that I wasn't about to get involved in. Instead I made a simple filling with sauteed kale, garlic and crimini mushrooms and brushed the pork with some fig jam that I had at home to give it some sweetness. By the way: If you have this fear of serving "healthy" veggies at a dinner party such as kale because you think your guests are going to balk at them, throw the fear out the window. I honestly don't think my guests even realized the green stuff in the filling was kale considering there was nothing left on anyones plates.
-I wrapped my pork in the prosciutto, seared it off and right as it was about to go into the oven, I gave it another brush with the fig jam to let it caramelize on top.
-Around the pork, I roasted chopped up apple slices and whole red grapes that I tossed in the leftover pan drippings mixed with the fig jam instead of the apple cider and chicken stock mixture they suggested.
-Because I was no longer cooking an entire loin of stuffed pork, I adjusted my cooking time from an hour and 40 minutes to just around an hour where it registered at the 140 degree mark.