I Need a New Butcher!

Last night's dinner was a success! But my pork loin roast was impossible to cut due to that pesky bone along the base of it (see my previous entry for the saga). I was unable to cut through the bone to cut the whole chop off so I had to carve the meat off the rack and leave the bones intact. Rats! Anyway, other than that small catastrophe, the pork tasted great.

Roasted Rack of Pork Loin

• Rack of pork loin
• Chopped fresh rosemary
• Fresh Sage
• Salt
• Pepper
• Garlic

1. Place a rack on the second level from the bottom of oven and preheat to 500 degrees
2. Place the pork in a roasting pan, curved bones facing down.
3. Cover the roast in chopped rosemary, salt, and pepper. Make small incisions all over the pork and slip in slivers of garlic. Do the same with sage leaves.
4. Put the pork in the oven to roast for approximately 45 minutes or until a meat thermometer registers 160 degrees. When done let it rest for 10 minutes before cutting.

I'll be posting a couple more recipes from what I made last night. More to come later....

Swine Myology

So, we're having a friend over for dinner tonight and I decided to do a bone-in pork loin roast. They look so great in pictures. The guy at the meat counter had no clue what I was talking about when I said I wanted to do a bone-in pork loin roast. (The language barrier didn't help and my ESL teaching skills didn't seem to work in this interaction). I ended up pointing to the bone in pork loin chops and told him I wanted 8 of those in one big piece. He pulled this giant side of pork out of a box and cut it up for me. When I asked him to clean the bones of the cartilage he had no idea what I was talking about. Anyway, I brought this huge side of pork home with me and trimmed the cartilage (and what looked like meat) from in between each bone. There was a flat bone that ran along the bottom of the roast that I hammered off, yes hammered, I don't have a hack saw. There is still a bone that runs along the base that I couldn't do anything with that I'm hoping is going to break when I go to slice the chops to serve them. Sounds like deja vu with my previous Guess Who's Coming to Dinner entry. But, we'll see what happens. Here's a picture of what the roast looks like now. I'll do a recap of the meal later. I'm doing a mish-mash of recipes on the pork loin but planning on doing a high temperature roast with it.

Oh by the way, while I was panicking about how to clean this pork I was Googling different phrases, you know, things like "Oh my God, help me clean a rack of pork" and "howtocleanarackofpork.com" etc. I stumbled upon this website dedicated to Bovine Myology with a butcher chopping up cows, you can even rewind and fast forward and pause. Can't you hear the cows on BovineCNN with a panicked report that there are "how to slaughter videos" being posted on the internet? It's just mooooooo-rtifying!. Pretty cool and creepy all at the same time. Check it out....