I adapted this recipe from a recipe I found at the "A Spoonful of Sugar" blog. The blogger used pancetta to wrap the pork. I used what I had at the house for the following:
Ingredients
- two pork tenderloins
- one-half sweet onion such as vidalia
- one sweet apple such as gala
- 12-16 sage leaves
- one-third to one-half pound bacon
Cooking Instructions
Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Core an apple and slice it into rounds which are a few centimeters thick (2-3 cm). Slice the onion similarly.
Line a cookie sheet with alumnium foil. Line up the sliced apple-rounds the length of the pork. Place the fresh sage leaves along the apple row. Then, place the onion over the top of the apple and sage.
Coat the pork tenderloin with white and black pepper heavily, and lightly salt with coarse kosher salt. Then, wrap the tenderloin with bacon, taking the thin end of the tenderloin and folding it up so that the tenderloin has approximately uniform thickness. Use toothpicks through the bacon to hold the bacon on the pork and to hold the thin end together.
Once the oven is preheated, cook the pork for about 30 minutes. After you remove the dish, cover it with a layer of tinfoil, then layer some kitchen towels or placemats or other cloth and allow the meat to rest for 8-10 minutes. Your meat thermometer will tell you to allow pork to reach a temperature, in the center, of 160 degrees, but if immediately after pulling the pork out of hte oven, the temperature of the center registers 150 degrees, the pork will finish cooking as it rests and you are done cooking. After the pork has rested, slice and serve.
The "spoonful of sugar" site calls for spreading olive oil over the meat, but since I used bacon (and was out of olive oil) I figured the fat from the bacon was sufficient to season the pork.
While I listed salt among the ingredients here, I did not salt the pork I prepared tonight. I thought it was plenty flavorful, but my wife found the dish to be underseasoned (thus, I added salt to the ingredient list). The sweetness of the apple blends well with the sage and onion and goes really well with the pork. Since everything cooks in one dish in the oven, it's really simple, and, other than the fresh sage, contains simple, easy to find ingredients you likely have in the house most of the time anyway.
I don't normally have fresh sage, but I recently picked up some live herbs from Home Depot. I bought rosemary, basil, lavender, cilantro, and sage plants. I highly recommend starting a small herb garden. It's hard to buy fresh herbs in small amounts at the store, and I have really enjoyed being able to walk on to the porch, snip the herbs I need for dinner, and leave the rest growing on the plant.
This dish is relatively low-carb, though the apple and onion may be too much for someone who's really restricting carbs.
It might also be nice to use rosemary instead of the sage.
Links to Other Simple, Low Carbohydrate Dinner Recipes
Links to Simple, Low Carbohydrate Breakfast Recipes
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