This year we celebrated Thanksgiving at our new house and my dad and brother and Tom’s family came. I spent a lot of time the weeks leading up to it stressing out about it and it was all for nothing, everything turned out great! We even managed to get a dining table right before the day. One of the things I was nervous about was cooking for everyone – especially because I hate traditional Thanksgiving food (blasphemy, I know). I don’t like turkey so I decided not to cook one, and figured my dad could cover that part, but I wanted to make some type of meat that I would eat. I typically make some type of pork tenderloin for holidays but wanted to do something to spice it up this year so I decided to stuff it with a mix of sausage, spinach, and mozzarella cheese. Turns out this was a great idea – it very well may have been the best pork tenderloin ever and everyone loved it, and most importantly it was easy.
Here’s what you need:
1 Pork Tenderloin (boneless, 2-3 pounds)
1 Bag Frozen Spinach
1 Bag Mozzerella Cheese
1 Package Sweet Italian Sausage
Your Favorite Seasoning (Garlic, Basil, Parsley, etc)
1) Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. While it’s preheating brown the sausage. In a large mixing bowl mix the sausage, spinach, and cheese, and whatever extra herbs and seasonings you wish. All I added was a dash of garlic as the sausage already had seasoning.
2) Cut your pork loin parallel to a cutting board about a half inch up from the cutting board but do not cut it all the way through, leave about another half an inch (like you were cutting open a sub roll), and open it up. Using a meat tenderizer pound out your meat, but don’t overdo it. Add some salt and pepper here if you like.
3) Spread the sausage, spinach, and cheese mixture evenly across the loin, but leave some room towards the edges to make it easier to roll up. You probably will not have room for all the filling that you prepared so save that to put on top of the loin. Either roll the loin or, if you put too much stuffing in it like I did, just fold it back over in half.
4) Add some wine (I used some of the apple cider sangria I served) to the bottom of a roasting pan and put the stuffed loin in the pan. Add the extra stuffing if you have any on top of the loin. Bake for 45 minutes, or until your meat thermometer says it’s at 145 degrees (Pork is tricky because it may still be pinkish when it’s done so it’s important to actually use a thermometer).
5) Enjoy!
Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving – I can not believe that now we are only a couple of days until Christmas. I also served a delicious apple cider sangria – just add one carton of apple cider to 2 bottles of wine and cut up some fresh apples and voila! It’s so delicious and the perfect Thanksgiving alcoholic beverage!
And here are some other pictures from our day:
Leave a Reply