Slow-Cooker Cranberry Pork

Last Thanksgiving, I insisted on making enough food to feed an army, despite only having three people (including myself and hubby) over for dinner. Our dinner guest was experiencing her first real American Thanksgiving and I thought it was appropriate to make all the American traditions, including cranberry sauce, which I have never been a huge fan of. However, I figured that it had been a pretty long time since I’d actually had cranberry sauce, and I actually like tart cranberry-flavored things now, so it couldn’t be too bad. Plus, when I’m in charge of the kitchen, I can do modifications to fit my own liking, such as serving the cranberry sauce warm instead of cold (much more appetizing, in my opinion, but I do realize I’m in the minority here).

Anyway, long story short, I made homemade, from-scratch cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving. And I had a LOT left over. I managed to use up a lot of my Thanksgiving leftovers, i.e. turned the turkey into creamy turkey soup, turned the mashed potatoes into gnocchi (pretty disappointing but I think I did it wrong), and I located a recipe for using up leftover cranberry sauce that I really wanted to try. However, by that point I felt like I’d been cooking for a month straight and I never got up the motivation to try the recipe before the cranberry sauce went bad. I saved it, though (the recipe, not the cranberry sauce).

Recently, I started a new job. This new job has some unconventional hours, and twice a week I don’t get home until 7:30 or 8:00 PM. I’ve had an increased interest in using my slow cooker, since it’s so late that I really just want dinner to be ready when I get home, so I thought I’d revisit that old pork recipe that I’d saved.

I wanted to use canned cranberry sauce for ease and convenience. Do you know how hard it is to find cranberry sauce in June? It’s hard, just take my word for it. I think it was with the canned fruits, right alongside the peaches in sugary syrup. But I did find it.

So here are my ingredients: cranberry sauce, French dressing, and a pork tenderloin. Also, I was supposed to grab an onion, but that got forgotten in my search for cranberry sauce. I substituted a packet of onion soup mix, which was suggested by a reviewer of the recipe.

To make the sauce, take some French dressing…

Add a can of cranberry sauce….

And dump them together. Add a packet of dry onion soup mix…

And mix it up until it’s relatively smooth.

Season a 3-pound pork tenderloin with salt and pepper (mine was sliced lengthwise, I have no idea why).

And squish it into your little crock pot.

Pour the cranberry-French-dressing-onion mixture on top of it, turn the crock pot to low and cover it, and leave it alone while you’re off earning the big bucks (okay okay, little bucks).

At the end of the day, not gonna lie, it looks a little funky at first.

Once I started cutting it up a bit, it looked more familiar and more appetizing.

As for sides, I kept it simple. I whipped up a batch of garlic mashed potatoes from a box and steamed some frozen chopped broccoli. Actually, a relatively healthy meal overall.

And there you have it, slow-cooker cranberry pork! Not my favorite recipe ever, but I’ve never been a huge pork fan so I can’t hold that against it. But it was sweet and flavorful, and hubby ate everything on his plate, so I think it was a success. And the ease of it was just wonderful.

Recipe in Tastebook shortly.