Mystery Pork Sauce and Product Review

We hope everyone had a most merry Christmas—Jessi and I sure did. We got to experience the best of both worlds. Our break started the week before Christmas in the Florida Keys where we had weather in the 70's all week and ended on Christmas Day in Morganton, NC with eight inches of snow (luckily the snow came after our air travel). It was a restful week off and great holiday season, we both feel very blessed.



Just in case any of ya'll are still in need for some late gifts or ideas to spend Chrimmus cash on I'd thought I'd talk about this sweet gadget I use from time to time when cooking larger meats. I know this is a bit ill-timed being that half the country is experiencing near frigid temperatures and standing over a grill is the last thing you want to do, but too bad — I like to grill year round. The other week Jessi and I decided to tackle this massive pork lion we bought. Sometimes these super-huge meats can be pretty intimidating to grill because it's so hard to tell when they're done. The trick is to use a grill with a lower, indirect heat and constantly monitor the meat's temperature. If your grill is outside the porch and out on the patio (like ours) this can mean a lot of up-and-down and in-and-out to check your meat's temp. This is where the Oregon Scientific AW131 Grill Right Wireless Talking BBQ and Oven Thermometer comes into play. This thing is a beaut! It has this insulted cord that you stick into the center of your meat and it connects to a receiver that you place on the shelf by your grill. The battery-powered unit comes complete with a belt clip that goes wherever you go. It has a pretty impressive range too. Then you set your target temp for the meat and the unit will begin alerting you when your meat gets close to its target. It has all these predetermined settings for different types of meat from rare to well-done in case you're not sure what the temp is for certain meats and seafoods. It even has like seven different languages and talks to you — the thing is spectacular. And no, we are not getting any perks for this post, this is just an honest review. Although, I sure wish we were!

Pictured above is an example of our perfectly cooked pork loin with a Dijon sauce whose recipe I can not locate for the life of me. This really sucks because the sauce was a delight. We're sorry, we should be more organized. Anyway, you can look at the picture and imagine how good it was. That's it for now we'll try to squeeze in a couple more posts before 2011. Cheers to all!

Update! We found the recipe. It was a Paula Dean original. You can view it here. It does call for tamarind concentrate, which we couldn't find. We thought we'd be clever and make our own. We bought the tamarind seeds and everything. We did not, however, realize you have to soak those bad boys overnight. Not too accommodating when you need it in an hour. After trying to squeeze some juice out of our 30-minute soaked beans, we gave up and just omitted them. Still tasted great!