In the Bag: Pecan Crusted Roast Pork Loin with Qunice Glazed Pears

I’m not really a competitive person. I didn’t play team sports as a child, and I generally don’t get involved in competitive situations as an adult. But I’m willing to make an exception for certain “food challenges.” These aren’t so much about competition as they are about seeing who comes up with what interesting ideas. No one “wins” and yet everyone wins, because ideas are proliferated, and we all benefit from the creativity of others.

In this case, the challenge (a link to Julia’s homepage is here if you want to look around further) is to take three seasonal ingredients and create a dish using them. The ingredients for January are pears, nuts, and lemon. I considered the combinations that immediately occurred to me—a pear crumble or crisp with chopped nuts in the topping, or a salad with candied nuts and pears. But I kept thinking, wanting to create something a little more unexpected.

I worked around the idea of coming up with a savory dish, something for a nice weekend dinner. That’s mostly when I have the opportunity to cook these days. We’ve been eating a lot of steak lately, so I was hoping to find something that we could have instead. Since I love pork loin, and pork and pears go nicely together, that was the direction in which I moved. I’m not usually much of one for chutney or fruit relish with meat, so I made the pears more of a side dish, cutting them into slices instead of cubes.

The first time I made this, I used Bocs pears. The second time I used Asian. My husband said he preferred the Bosc, but I felt the Asian added a wonderful undertone of honey to the whole dish that was a sparkling surprise dimension. Either type of pear would be fine, but I highly recommend the Asian if you’re feeling adventurous. I had never had an Asian pear at all before this, but now I’m on my way to the grocery store to buy some more to eat out of hand. And I love the idea of using quince paste. It’s seasonal and quite underappreciated in this country. Generally you see it recommended as an accompaniment for cheese, and that’s about it. It has so many potential uses in a more starring role; it’s a shame to relegate it to a supporting player in every instance.

I mixed my own honey mustard, but prepared honey mustard could be used for those in a hurry. I also used bread crumbs that I made from old bread and stored in the freezer. I wouldn’t recommend the finely powdered store bought variety. They really do need to have some heft to them. I specified either all stock or a wine and stock combination in the pears. It’s really a matter of preference.


Pecan Crusted Roast Pork Loin with Quince Glazed Pears

1 pork loin roast, approx 2 lbs
¾ c pecans
2 c fresh bread crumbs
3 T Dijon mustard
1 T honey

1 T butter
4 Bosc or Asian pears
1 T quince paste
¼ c white wine
½ c chicken stock
(or ¾ c chicken stock)
Juice of 1 lemon
Salt & freshly ground pepper, to taste

Preheat oven to 475 degrees F.

Toast pecans in a skillet over medium heat until just starting to brown. Allow to cool slightly, then combine with bread crumbs in the bowl of a food processor. Pulse 10-12 times until pecans are in fairly small pieces and well incorporated into bread crumbs. Turn crumbs out onto parchment on the countertop, or into a large rimmed baking sheet.

Combine mustard and honey in a bowl (commercial honey mustard could also be used). Brush top and sides of the roast with honey mustard and roll in crumb mixture until well coated. Press extra crumbs to the surface of the roast to ensure it’s coated all over.

Place roast on a rack in a roasting pan. Roast at 475 for 20 minutes. Reduce oven heat to 400 and continue cooking for another 40 minutes, or until internal temperature reaches 160 degrees F. Remove roast from oven and allow to rest 10 minutes. Carve into slices and serve with pears.

For pears, peel, core and slice pears into wedges. Melt 1 tablespoon of butter in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Sautee pears in butter for 8 to 10 minutes, until just turning golden brown. Add the quince paste and stir to let it coat the pears as it melts. Add wine (if using) and stock, and reduce heat to medium. Continue cooking over medium heat until pears are soft, but not disintegrating, and quince paste is completely melted. Add the juice of 1 lemon, salt and pepper to taste. Serve with pork.

I served this first with oven roasted potatoes and sautéed Brussels sprouts, and the second time with mashed potatoes and a very disappointing sauté of spring onions. Next time I’ll have to consult the Fine Cooking in which I originally saw the article on using scallions as more than just an oniony garnish, and find an actual recipe, of which there were several, if I recall correctly. The end result of my efforts in this case was limp and bitter, so I need to see what I may have done wrong.

In both cases, however, the pork and pears went beautifully together and made for a very pleasant Saturday night dinner.

Let Us Eat Cake...and Cobbler...and Muffins

We had a dessert-heavy weekend. Alex made an apple cobbler, and a chocolate zucchini cake. I made pear and granola muffins. Actually the muffins aren’t so much a dessert, as a mid-morning snack item, but I’m grouping them with dessert (hey, the twins called them “cake”; work with me on this one).

The apples and the zucchini both came from our new house. Until about two weeks ago, my cousin lived in a rental house near where we’re building our new house, and they planted a garden in the spring. Now they’ve moved into the house they built for themselves, and the garden of the rental house has been left untended. My cousin told my husband he was welcome to whatever he could find in it (which to date is a really big zucchini, and a lot of tomatoes that need to have something done with them fast).

The whole island we live on was once strawberry fields and apple orchards. There are still a few apple trees (OK, more than few—a lot of apple trees) scattered around on various properties, including ours, so he picked a few and brought them home. I have no idea what kind of apples they are. Red ones. Ones that made a really good cobbler.

The cobbler was Saturday night’s dessert. He had asked me to find him a recipe, so I pulled out The New England Cookbook: 350 Recipes from Town and Country, Land and Sea, Hearth and Home by Brooke Dojny, on the grounds that a cookbook that focuses on the food of New England should have an outstanding apple cobbler recipe. Brooke didn’t let me down, but somehow things didn’t work out as planned. Not realizing what I was marking, he looked at the page, saw a recipe title, assumed that was it and dismissed it because it called for whole apples (it was Maple Baked Apples or something; he’d already started cutting them into cubes).

I suppose this proves the rule that the human eye falls to the right. The recipe I was marking was on the left facing page, although admittedly the title was not. The title appeared at the bottom of the previous page, just under the headnotes. I think this is a layout problem with that book as a whole—it’s the case in more than one instance—but I’m willing to overlook it because the recipes in general are pretty good. Not that the recipe he ended up making wasn’t good—it was, very—but it wasn’t the one I picked out for him to make.

So Alex pulled a recipe from the Bon Appetit Cookbook, which was supposed to be a pear cobbler, but for which he substituted apples. I would like to take a moment here to encourage everyone who has their complete cookbook collection unboxed and under one roof to pause and give thanks for this. I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to have had to cull down my collection to almost nil because we’re in a teeny little rental house. The only cookbooks I really have accessible are the twenty or so I deemed critical to my survival, and the ones I’ve collected since we moved (a frighteningly high number, actually—let's just move on).

Anyway, the cobbler, served with vanilla ice cream, was an excellent dessert after baked pork chops, Brussels Sprouts with Balsamic Glazed Red Onions, and oven roasted Yellow Finn potatoes. Very autumnal and perfect for a rainy night in late September.

The chocolate cake was also a Bon Appetit Cookbook recipe, and used two cups of grated zucchini (sadly, our monster zucchini made about four cups shredded; we may be having some kind of fried zucchini cake for dinner one night this week). This my older son adored, because it was chocolate cake. Of course, he did ask what the green thing in the cake was. In typical dad style, my husband stumbled and stuttered, not wanting to tell him it was a vegetable, but not sure how else to get out of it. Mom, of course, always knows what to say.

“It’s part of the flour. Flour sometimes does that.”

Say anything in an authoritative tone, and people will believe you, even skeptical four-year-olds.

The muffins were from an old issue of Everyday Food. I noticed them a couple of weeks ago, and decided to make them to have as a morning snack. Every morning around 10 a.m. I feel the need for a snack. I often eat an apple, but I’m finding I’d like a little something more to carry me over to lunch (which keeps getting later and later as I get busier at work). So I made the muffins, using the last crumbs of a box of Kashi Go Lean Crunch cereal. I’ve found that once you get down to the small pieces of that cereal, it’s just not worth much on yogurt (which is how I usually eat it), and besides, it’s usually stale by that time. So making it a muffin ingredient worked out well.

I planned to make them while Alex took my older son to the (indoor) swimming pool, and the twins and the baby napped. What I didn’t bargain on was one twin taking a scant hour long nap. Thus, I measured, peeled, chopped and folded, all the while answering the same three questions over and over—What are these? (Muffin tin liners); Where is Matthew—is he in time out for throwing toys? (No, he’s napping); and We’re not supposed to throw toys, right? (Right).

In the end, they were a success (the twins ate one each, Chris said they weren’t as good as the chocolate cake, Alex wasn’t sure about the crisp topping, but said the flavor was good), and I’d make them again, but I think I might pulse the pears in the food processor. Even though I cut them into the ¼” chunks the recipe calls for, I still found the pieces to be a little big. Otherwise they were fine, except that the topping did burn a little bit. I’m not sure how to get around that. Using the topping the recipe called for, as opposed to the Kashi Go Lean Crunch, might help. I might try it the next time I make them.

So I have my to do list for this week: find something to do with remaining shredded zucchini, make notes on pear and granola muffin recipe to chop pears finer and figure out how to keep topping from burning, and make tomato sauce with the tomatoes before we become a headline in the local paper: Family of Six Consumed by Swarm of Fruit Flies.