Let Oven Do The Work, Not The Cook
Now that you’ve discovered the perfect use for your microwave oven - storing plastic grocery bags until you can recycle them - it may be time to rethink the conventional oven.
The oven has gotten a bad rap. You may think of it as a trap to tie you to the kitchen, but that doesn’t have to be the case. Oven cooking can be liberating.
Just think: You can put food into an oven and forget about it - not entirely, of course, but until the enticing aromas tell you dinner is ready. There’s no stirring, no turning dishes, no shock of steam hitting you, nothing but tender food and succulent flavors.
Georgia Chan Downard and Evie Righter named their recent cookbook “Reasons to Roast” (Houghton Mifflin, 1997). Rather than come out with a David Letterman-style list, they provide recipes for such mouthwatering dishes as roast garlic and cream cheese dip, roasted lemon chicken and roasted carrots with ginger.
When we roast, dinner can be on the table without any fuss, and we can still handle the thousand other things that seem to pop up at the same time.
“The oven - not the cook - does the work,” write the authors in their introduction.
If you think that roasting is a technique you’ll only use if you’re serving half a cow, relax. You can roast small portions of meat as easily as you can a prime rib roast. The only things you’ll need are a hot oven, a heavy roasting pan that won’t buckle and a meat thermometer.
You can roast all the elements of an entree - meat, vegetables and starch - together, or you can use separate pans to maintain the individual flavors.
In the following recipe for pork tenderloin with potatoes and Brussels sprouts, the meat is roasted alone and has a sweet-ginger accent. The vegetables are a plain foil for the pork seasonings. Both require the same roasting time and temperature.
Roast Pork Tenderloin and Vegetables
1 small pork tenderloin, about 12 ounces, well trimmed of fat
1/4 cup plus 3 tablespoons hoisin sauce
1 garlic clove, minced
1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger root
1 tablespoon dry sherry
Vegetables (recipe follows)
1 tablespoon minced green onion, green part only
1-1/2 teaspoons prepared Dijon mustard
Place pork in glass bowl. In cup, stir together 1/4 cup hoisin sauce, garlic, ginger and sherry. Pour over pork. Marinate in refrigerator 2 hours, turning once.
Place pork on rack over foil-lined roasting pan. Pour marinade into small pan and bring to boil. Boil 3 minutes.
Roast pork at 400 degrees for 30 minutes or until meat thermometer registers 160 degrees. Baste pork generously with marinade halfway through roasting. Prepare vegetables and place in oven at the same time as the pork.
When done, remove pork from oven and let rest 5 minutes. Thinly slice and arrange on serving platter. Sprinkle with green onion. Arrange vegetables alongside pork.
In small bowl, stir together remaining 3 tablespoons hoisin sauce and mustard. Serve on side as sauce. Serve immediately.
Yield: 2 servings.
Nutrition information per serving, including vegetables: 550 calories, 16 grams fat (26 percent fat calories), 44 grams protein, 58 grams carbohydrate, 100 milligrams cholesterol, 1,231 milligrams sodium.
Vegetables
1/2 pound fingerling or small new potatoes, washed and dried
1/2 pound Brussels sprouts, trimmed
2 to 3 garlic cloves, in skins
1 tablespoon olive oil
1/4 cup chicken broth
Salt, pepper
In small, heavy enamel or cast-iron casserole, combine potatoes, Brussels sprouts and garlic. Add oil, chicken broth and salt and pepper to taste. Stir well to coat vegetables. Roast at 400 degrees 30 minutes or until fork tender.
Yield: 2 servings.