Spiced Carrots (and a Perfect Pork Tenderloin)

This post is going to be severely deficient in terms of pictures. See, I didn’t think I needed to take them when I was cooking. As is often the case, the meal didn’t seem to be anything special until I sat down to eat. By then, of course, it was too late, so you’ll have to forgive me. I guess I could have at least taken a picture of the finished product in a nice bowl, but I didn’t get the camera out until we were done eating. Oops.

I had a recipe printed out for spiced carrots and sitting in my recipe binder for ages. I printed it out in 2007 (I know because it has the date printed on it), and for some reason or another, I never got around to making it. Why, I don’t know. I love cooked carrots, but I never make them. Maybe I just never think to buy carrots. Anyway, I had some and I finally decided to.

Basically, step 1 was to julienne the carrots. I didn’t feel like doing it by hand, so I used my food processor. They ended up sliced a lot thinner than I had intended, but I guess that’s good because the cooking time was decreased. I also used twice as many carrots as the recipe called for, because hey, what else am I going to do with 5 leftover carrots?

The sauce is simply melted butter, cinnamon, sugar, and salt. But it’s much different than you expect, because the emphasis is much heavier on the salt than the sugar. This is not a cinna-sweet dish. It’s savory, and it was such a nice change from the usual sweet cinnamon dishes.

As for the main dish, I didn’t even take a picture of that.

I used a prepared, pre-marinated pork tenderloin just like ones I’ve made before. This isn’t the exact one, but same idea:

I’ve prepared these several times, and I finally figured out how to keep it from drying out. And it’s really obvious, so don’t get too excited. Instead of cutting into it after the 40 minutes that the package called for, I simply checked a meat thermometer that I had inserted. Not ready, and I didn’t need to spill all the juices to learn that.

It made all the difference. The meat was so juicy by the time that it was done that not only did hubby enjoy it for that meal, he also enjoyed the leftovers. Take a moment to ponder the significance of that.

Lesson learned.

So dinner was my insignificant pre-fabbed pork tenderloin, simple but yummy carrots, and steamed rice. Delicious and relatively healthy too, if you can overlook the butter on the carrots!