It was time to try the second of three recipes from my free Blue Apron trial week. I decided on the Roast Pork with Sauteed Spinach & Olive Smashed Potatoes because the spinach seemed the most perishable of the remaining ingredients from my box. Also, I was excited about the mashed potatoes with olives, a combination I hadn’t seen before. (Though I was surprised to see that the company put two meals featuring mashed potatoes – this and the cod brandade I made first – in the same week.)
This recipe was a bit simpler than the first, filling up only five of the six instruction slots on the recipe card. It started with searing the pork in a skillet and placing it in a hot oven. The 18-to-20 minute roasting time was then used to cook the potatoes and spinach.
This was quite a straightforward recipe to follow. I liked the fact that the spinach was sauteed in the same pan where the pork was roasted, giving the greens a little more flavor and cutting down on pans to wash. There was also plenty of spinach for two satisfying portions, which is impressive because spinach cooks down so much. The lemon zest was a nice touch as well.
The potatoes I’d been looking forward to were delicious, flavored with sour cream, lemon, olive oil, and garlic chives (an unusual and tasty ingredient) as well as the green olives. The flavor was tangy and light, a really nice change of pace.
The only part I was a bit disappointed in was the pork itself, which I found to be a little dry, though I undercut the 145 degrees the instructions specified by 5 or 10 degrees. It was visibly moist as I cut it, but by the time I’d plated and served it, it had already dried out considerably. Pork tenderloin is an extremely lean cut, and cooking it without drying it out is tricky. Not that it was bad – in fact, as I was talking about this at the table, Arne told me he thought it was plenty moist. Still, I wish a simple pan sauce had been part of the recipe – or maybe the meat shouldn’t have been sliced before plating.
Despite minor complaints about the pork, I enjoyed this meal quite a bit. The potatoes, especially, were winners, and I will be keeping that part of the recipe around to use in the future. There was plenty of food, with none of the feeling of “filler” that I got from the pile of bread that went with the slightly meager brandade.
Next up, my final Blue Apron recipe: Chicken Meatballs & Creamy Polenta with Tomato Sugo & Lacinata Kale.
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