Peter's Cooking Diary #18

It has been a little while since my last entry, I have been a bit busy and haven't done as much cooking as I normally do or as much as I would like to do. Today I finally had the time to cook, and even though I have a shortened week at work I wanted to make something, but before we get into that, I had a product that I really like that I wanted to show off a little.

This is real hand made, locally produced butter that is hand rolled into a tube, it comes in a 2 pound roll that lasts me for a long, long time.

This is what the 2 lb roll looks like, and it comes wrapped in a few layers in wax paper.

So I used my  butter on some nice artisan bread with rosemary, cheese, and bacon in it. Because I don't have a toaster I used a pan on the stove top to brown the bead up.

Toasting the bread in a pan on one side, The other side was also buttered.

Toasty golden brown on the first side time for a flip to brown on the other side.

The next step was to slice the brie, which was going to go on top of the toasted bread.

The bread in the pan topped with some nice slices of brie, the pan was then put under the broiler to toast up and melt the brie.

Under the broiler the bread got nice and toasty, and the brie melted so nicely. I let it rest so as to not burn my mouth but it was very tempting. I sliced up a nice crisp and juicy apple to accompany this and it was quite delicious together.

Once again I started my main cooking for the day, as usual it had to start with bacon, I cooked off a whole pound, this amount got drained and then put in the fridge to get added to some eggs during the week.

This amount got added to the crock pot to start the recipe that I was making. I have made something similar to this with pork chops, but this week I made a pork loin roast because that was on sale.

The next step was to cook down some onions in some bacon grease. I added a little salt and started cooking the onions down.

After the onions had had some time to cook and picked up some bacon bits from the bottom of the pan, onions are a great way to deglaze the pan.

To the pan I added the garlic to the pan, and continued cooking the onions down. I cooked the onions and garlic down for a few minutes.

I added flour to the pan to thicken everything up, and stirred it in with the mixture of onions and garlic, and let it good for a few more minutes to get the flour taste out.

After the flour had been cooked in with the onions for a minutes. I then added chicken stock and scraped up all of the bits that remained in the pan.

Once the stock had helped me scraping up the bit in the pan, I added everything to the crock pot with the bacon, and stirred to combine.

I added some thyme, oregano, and red pepper flake for additional seasoning to the pot.

I added some soy sauce and bay leaves as the final ingredients before the roast and stirred everything together once more.

I always season my meat before cooking it. Salt and pepper on both sides of the roast before putting it into the crock pot.

Once the roast had been seasoned I nestled it into the mixture in the crock pot. The mixture already smelled amazing in the crock pot!

The roast fell apart as I was taking it out of the crock pot showing me that it was definitely done cooking.

I went to remove the fat from the roast, but honestly most of it had melted into the sauce that remained in the pan.

This was the delicious mixture that remained in the crock pot after removing the roast. The recipe states to let it cool and use it as is, but I had other ideas.

I wanted to make a nice onion and mushroom gravy to go on top of the roast. So I heated up the sauce and added some mushrooms and just let it simmer.

The sauce reduced and thickened up nicely, I cooked it until the mushrooms were cooked to my liking and then poured the sauce into a container to cool.

To go with the roast and sauce I wanted to make some mashed potatoes, and to me the Tukon Gold variety is the best to use for mashed potatoes. I bought a 3 lb bag of smaller potatoes to use for this. I sliced them up, some potatoes were halved some were quartered, I just wanted to get them all to similar size so they would cook at the same speed.

I boiled the potatoes in salted water until they were fork tender. I then drained the potatoes.

I added the potatoes to a bowl and mashed them up with some of the same Amish butter that I showed earlier in the post. I like Yukon Golds because they can be mashed up easily and I actually like the texture that leaving the skins on adds to the mixture.

This was the final dish I made with this amount of cooking. Mashed potatoes topped with some roast pork and some onion and mushroom gravy with a side of steamed buttered broccoli. It was delicious and filling.