Mushroom stuffed pork tenderloin with roasted tomatoes

I was talking to a friend yesterday and she was mulling over what to cook for a dinner party, she wanted to cook fish, but she said the fish alone was going to cost over $40.00.  I said I entertain a lot and most of the time I make chicken or pork, one reason being that you can feed quite a few people very reasonably.  Actually I like chicken and pork as well though.

Any way we were have a couple of neighbours over for dinner and I went to an old standby pork tenderloin.  This is not only relatively cheap, but it is low fat, tasty and very versatile.  Since it is a long weekend and I have a little more time than usual, I decided to do something a little fancier than normal.
Which involves "butterflying" the tenderloin to make it much larger and flatter, therefore making it easier to stuff.  I took pictures, so I am hoping it makes sense.

First take the pork tenderloin and cut it length ways 1/3 down and do not cut all the way through, so that you can open it up making the meat already twice as wide with one side being twice the thickness of the other side.

Now turn over the tenderloin.

On the thicker side (that would be on the side closest to my camera, cut length ways again from the middle and again not all the way through so that you can open it up again.

Feeding hungry men - steak, dinner

Friday of the Easter weekend dawned bright and sunny and almost warm for the first time this year so good friends of ours chose this day to stucco a large wall along their property line.  They phoned my husband to see if he would help and of course he jumped at the chance to help a friend.  They had solicited other friends and relatives and it was hands on hard work all day.

Of course I could not help with the physical labour, (my back and all) so the best I could do to help with the proceedings is to work with Nancy to pull off a dinner to feed the workers.  We decided steak would be an appropriate choice for manual labourers

The workers

This is not so much recipes as a menu and some ideas should you find your self having to feed some hard working men.

A night of tropical food

Still feeling tropical after our trip to Puerto Rico, on Saturday night I decided to host a tropical dinner.  Within the next few weeks a couple of friends are going down to the British Virgin Islands and then another couple to Hawaii so we were all feeling tropical.

The menu came together at the last minute (as they usually do) I was inspired by the pig roast in Rincon, but the best I could come up with, was some belly pork from the Superstore that still had the skin on it.  So before going out shopping for couches and food I rubbed the skin with some course salt scored it heavily and placed it in a 300 oven.  It was in there for about 3 hours until a lot of the fat had melted away and the skin was crisp.

Cooked pork

I realize this is really no substitute for a whole roasted pig but it was the best I could come up with on short notice and that skin was wonderful. Obviously this was not enough to feed 9 and one person doesn't eat pork so I decided to cook jerk chicken.  We did not have this in Puerto Rico and I did not even see it on a menu, but it is big in Jamaica.  I cobbled together a recipe from what I could find on the Internet and what I had in the house.