the review: pork loin with sweet and sour cabbage

This pork loin with sweet and sour cabbage might be the easiest thing that I have ever cooked. Season the pork loin with olive oil, salt, pepper, and aromatic seeds (the recipe calls for caraway, but I forgot to get caraway seeds in my 17 trips to the grocery this week, so used cumin seeds). Bake for 25-35 minutes. While baking, make cabbage. Serve. Done.

Seriously, it was that easy. I will admit to being slightly annoyed with the recipe because while it instructed you to bake the pork loin for 25 minutes and meanwhile make the cabbage, the cabbage was supposed to cook for 50 minutes. Huh? Fortunately, my pork loin needed a bit longer in the oven and my cabbage was done early. Luck of the draw or typo? Hard to say.

The cabbage portion of this recipe is also easy. The flavor comes from using balsamic vinegar and brown sugar. The kids loved it. The boys repeatedly said it tasted like candy. Who knew we could have success with kale and spinach one night and cabbage the next. With teen boys, no less.

This is an easy, busy week-night meal. I made two pork loins at the same time so that the kids could make sandwiches out of the leftover pork for school. We thinly sliced the leftovers and provided some hoagie rolls to the lunch makers. Excellent lunch material. If there is any leftover, I will freeze it to add into something else later. I did not double the cabbage and we had plenty to feed five adult eaters.

One last bit on this recipe. If you haven’t clicked through yet, this recipe comes from the Williams-Sonoma blog, Taste. About a million years ago, Williams-Sonoma published a magazine by the same name. It wasn’t published for long, but I remember it having amazing recipes and beautiful photographs. This blog is no different. Check it out. Spend some time there. The recipes are a wonderful mix of simple and complicated, healthy greens and baked goods. There are also some great instructional posts. It’s worth a little time suck. Go ahead, you deserve it. Take a look and see what inspires you to get in the kitchen.