Month 7 day 13: Grilled, brined pork with summer fruit

Today I made:
Maple-Brined Pork, Cooking Light August 2011

This is a quick recipe, and it's in Cooking Light's budget cooking section too ($2.50/serving, it says. I'm not sure if that is what it came out to for me but probably not too far off). The only tricky part is thinking ahead to brine it. I sometimes get frustrated with recipes that require long preps in the morning (slow-cooker recipes are notorious for this). I have enough trouble getting out the door at a reasonable hour as it is! To get around this, I made the brine last night and put it in the refrigerator to cool down. That way, all I needed to do was to quickly add the pork in the morning. 

In the evening then, it's simply grilling the pork 3 minutes per side and grilling the fruit for 3 minutes. I left the pork in the grill pan at the end while the fruit took the center stage to make sure it was cooked all the way through, and partially covered the pan so that the fruit would cook through better (after 3 minutes, it was still pretty hard. Shaw's doesn't have the ripest fruit to begin with).

I didn't really need to eat dinner after eating too much sushi at Invertebrate Social Hour, but I made this anyway so that I would have lunch for tomorrow. And of course I just had to try a little bit to see how it was:

It was very good! The pork was juicy despite me giving it an extra few minutes on the grill pan. The fruit got juicy despite starting out hard as a rock. The maple syrup flavor is too subtle, but I dunno, maybe it's there in the background. The pork is salty though from all of that brining. I've no idea why it calls for more salt on the fruit and pork. It doesn't need anything more. I feel like this would be good over some orzo. I will eat it with the leftover baguette from the sandwiches I've been having.