Saturday, April 13, 2013

Month 3 day 10: Roast pork loin and no-knead rolls

Today I made: 
Hash brown cakes with ham and green onions, Cooking Light April 2010


This recipe for hash browns followed Cooking Light's Easter supper section, which had suggestions of what to do with all the leftover ham. Perfect for us! We've put a lot in our freezer, but it was good to use some up. The recipe called for refrigerated shredded hash browns, but I just assumed I could grate a potato-- hopefully there aren't some extra unlisted ingredients in that, but it seemed to work out fine. It was just two potatoes, 1.5 c ham, 0.5 c green onions, 2.5 Tbs flour, 2 eggs, and a bit of salt. We liked them. It's a nice and easy breakfast.

The pork roast was really good. We've made a pork roast once before, for Christmas Eve. That recipe was stuffed with something, which was nice, but it was a little dry. This recipe was still juicy. It might have been a different cut. The cut we got had instructions on the package for how you could cut it into a few different cuts (I don't remember which), and indeed the type of meat was different from one end to the other-- one was much darker than the other, and the cuts in the middle had a bit of each, as you can see in this picture. The whiter meat was a little dry, but the dark part was nice and moist. The lemon was pretty subtle-- could've been more-- and the mustard wasn't overwhelming (then again, I only put about half of the mustard as the recipe called for, because neither G nor I are big fans). The roasted vegetables were nice and soft.

The drippings turn into a sauce, with such beautiful golden rings:

The rolls were okay. I'm not really sure what the big draw of "no-knead" breads are. This recipe was more annoying, because it needed to be set up the day before (although I just did it the morning of). Because it wasn't kneaded, the dough was unruly and ended up with a crumb more like a biscuit than a roll. When I lived in Japan I took an ABC bread class where we made 26 different recipes (with A-Z names). Because each class was 2 hours long, it emphasized that bread could be made pretty quickly. So I'm not sure what the point of this recipe is, since it takes like 12 hours instead of 2. The combination of thyme and parmesan is good, though. 

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