A Pleasant Side Effect -2/11/09

As we walked into the house tonight after dinner, Richard commented that ever since I've started this "Gourmet" thing, our house smells good all the time. That's a wonderful, if unexpected, result from my still short-lived experiment making the recipes from the February 2009 Gourmet magazine. The smells from yesterday's Thai soup have melded into those of tonight's Fennel-Rubbed Pork Tenderloin with Roasted Fennel Wedges on page 56 and the Broccoli-Parmesan Gratin on page 57.

I thought I was a pretty creative cook and it's taken less than a week to disprove that. Yesterday I worked with lemongrass for the first time. Tonight, I used fennel bulbs and though I have eaten fennel bulbs before, I'd never cooked with them. The bulbs had the feel and look of celery without the bitter taste that cooked celery can impart. The Fennel-Rubbed Pork Tenderloin with Roasted Fennel Wedges was very good and quite simple. It was nice to use one pot from stove to oven. I have found that many recipes for pork tenderloin are very salty and this recipe was not salty at all. The flavor of the fennel was mild but after the Thai soup, it was nice to have a lightly flavored main dish.

The Broccoli-Parmesan Gratin was a weeknight keeper. It was simple to make, used very basic ingredients, and Eyrleigh loved it! We have a local company that sells flash-frozen vegetables in large amounts. I simply cooked the frozen pre-cut broccoli and used my Buttermilk Fantail rolls from earlier in the week for fresh bread crumbs. My only complaint was that the two recipes I chose for tonight were almost identical in color so the plate looked a little monochromatic. That was my error though, not the recipes.