I’ve been eating plenty of swine lately. I’ve always loved the pig, but pork tastes even better when it symbolizes a certain amount of freedom. The irony is that the pork they served at prison dining were actually among the better meals in the terminally boring rotation. BBQ Pork dinner — the second Monday and fourth Tuesday of every trip around the BOP menu merry-go-round — normally satisfied me. Once somebody even get a wild hair and created a Carolina mustard-based sauce to go on the pork, and that was about as close to eating real food as I can recall. That change did not necessarily go over well with my fellow inmates, however. After all, the establishment of routine often leads to a dependence on routine, and to change things up with something “weird” is to disrupt the entire world. Orthodoxy begets its blind adherents. Even the regular pulled pork in the tomato-based sauce was OK, however. A familiar old hymn to the glories of the BOP kitchen.
Perhaps another reason that the pork in prison was half-decent is because it was not very popular. A good number of inmates had religious or other ideological objections to eating it, and so the kitchen actually knew to prepare a smaller amount than they would for, let’s say, some kind of chicken dish. For a fairly large segment of the incarcerated population, pork for dinner goes over about as well as a sex offender in a papal conclave. Which is to say that it’s not as though a little sausage isn’t welcome from time to time, but one should have the propriety and doctrinal decency to publicly denounce it. The smaller volume may have led to a little more time and care taken in the preparation of the food which, in turn, is the bonus for the non-objectors.
Still, I haven’t yet had the gumption to prepare myself any post-prison pulled pork. Perhaps it’s yet a bit too soon. But smothered pork chops? Yeah, I have gobbled those down. And this week I even marinated and grilled a couple pork tenderloins that one can find for a really decent price at a place like COSTCO. And because we are having unseasonably nice spring weather this week, I even grilled them over charcoal. It’s funny how I had nearly forgotten how charcoal grilling makes things taste extra good. In the end, however, the tenderloin recipe was nothing special. It was an utter “let me look in the pantry and see what I have that I can use” food preparation plan. Being a bit burned out on BBQ and pseudo-Asian flavors, I decided to go European on the swine. I got out a gallon ziplock bag and poured in about a quarter cup of olive oil and maybe about a half cup of a combination of vinegars (I happened to have the end of a bottle of apple cider vinegar and some white balsamic handy). I found a semi-sclerotic lemon and zested that into the mix. I threw in some salt, pepper, dried thyme and caraway seeds, and swished it all up in the plastic bag. Then dropped in the tenderloins and made sure they were covered with the liquid and shoved them into the refrigerator for a few hours.
As grilling time drew nigh, I decided to go with a Euro starch too, quasi-German potato salad. I peeled and diced four medium potatoes and put them on to boil for 20 minutes. Meanwhile I fried up four pieces of bacon (pork on pork can be that bad, right?) until they got crispy. After I pulled them from the pan, I tossed up a diced onion and a could ribs of thinly slice celery into the remaining back fat and let all the get soft and a little golden. After cooking those vegetables a virtually non vegetable state, I added about a third of a cup of more vinegar, a chopped up pickle, a big spoonful of spicy mustard and some salt, pepper and some sugar. Stirred all that up and brought it to a simmer. When the potatoes were done, I drained then and put them back in the still hot boiling pan (now off the heat) and let them dry out a little more. Then I poured that vinegary sauce over them, crumbled up the crispy bacon on top and gently stirred the whole thing together.
The tenderloins came out of their marinade and went on a hot grill for 20 minutes, turning once in the middle of the cooking time. Pull the pork off and let it a rest for a few couple minutes while you get your veggie side of choice together, then slice it up and serve your post-prison feast. That is, unless you object to the swine. Then you can do this all in secret.