KITCHEN ADVENTURE: PORK LOIN OF DOOM! OK, so mostly my Kitchen Adventures have turned out well. I’m a confident and generally good cook: I know what I like, and I can tweak recipes to provoke tasty results. But this recipe thwarted and irked me. I expected to spend about an hour cooking it–most of that time taken up with simmering and similar “you can go about your business while the food cooks” stuff. Instead, I spent an hour and a half of mostly quite active cooking time–slicing and chopping and scraping and stirring, wrangling unhelpful ingredients and generally slaving over the proverbial hot stove–in order to produce a pork loin in wild mushroom sauce which, frankly, tasted like I’d thrown all the ingredients into a pan and sauteed for seven minutes. It wasn’t bad. It tasted good. But every minute I spent cooking the dratted thing detracted one flavor-util from my enjoyment of the resulting dish. Bottom line: Don’t try this at home.

What I used (or what used me!): Some pork loin, on sale. (The recipe called for double-cut lamb rib chops, so perhaps this was a big mistake, but the recipe also said that lots of different kinds of meat could be substituted for the expensive lambness; and in terms of taste, I honestly don’t think the problem was pork vs. lamb. I think it was an uninteresting recipe.) Dried ancho chile from a package. (This added, as far as my tongue could tell, precisely nothing to the resulting dish. Despite costing four doggone dollars.) Half a package of wild mushrooms. (Yeah, from a package. But given the amount of chopping etc. that I had to do for this dish, I don’t regret saving a bit of time by getting the wild mushrooms ready-to-go.) A plum tomato. A small onion, cut into quarters. Six cloves of garlic. Olive oil, salt, pepper, butter.

What I did: 1. Boiled water. Put dried ancho chili in bowl, and poured boiling water over said chile, to cover. Let sit 20 minutes. Then drained, stemmed, and seeded gross, slippery, nasty chili. Not fun. Stained fingers. Tore nasty chili into little pieces.

2. Put whole tomato, onion quarters, and garlic cloves in pan. Dry-roasted over moderately high heat, turning frequently. This was confusing and unpleasant, as vegetables seemed to char at random, with the tomato taking much, much longer than I expected. Also, I melted bits off my spatula on this step. Dry-roasting = the evil version of baking in the oven at 375. Lame. Anyway… when stuff was lightly charred, which took forever with constant watching and stirring, I took it out and set it aside. Tomato skins should “blister and char,” which in this case seemed to mean that one small segment of the skin would turn hideously black while the rest of the tomato (no matter how often I turned it) remained basically normal. Anyway, control your irritation, and when the veg’s are cool enough, chop them roughly. I also scrubbed the pan, because the charringness was starting to bother me.

3. Heat some olive oil. Season the (generic meat) with s & p. Brown well on both sides. Remove and set aside. (Here the recipe says to discard the fat from the pan. Honestly, I didn’t do this, because later in the recipe you’re supposed to use chicken broth, and I hate cooking with chicken broth (it’s really annoying unless you use it regularly, because it doesn’t keep), so I figured cooking everything in the pan juices would be a better idea. Despite the lameness of this recipe, I still think I’m right.

4. Melt the butter in the pan over moderately high heat. Saute the mushrooms, mmm, until “lightly browned,” about three minutes in your average recipe and two seconds on my stovetop. Add the annoying ancho chili strips/scraps. Add the veg’s. Add the stock if you’re amenable to stock. Add a bit of salt. Reduce heat, cover, simmer 20 minutes. (See? There is a little, tiny bit of non-active cooking time! Savor it!)

5. Add the (gen-meat) to the sauce and bring back to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer, uncovered, until meat is cooked to medium rare. (Recipe says 10-12 minutes. I assume that’s the time frame for Schmancy Lamb, because for Cheap-O Pork it was more like six minutes, if that.) Serve and enjoy just as if you had only spent seven minutes cooking it.

Sigh.