My dear friend Sharon, whom I have known well for the past 28 years, came to visit us yesterday. She’ll be here all week, and she already has the entire week’s worth of food planned for us.
This is typical. Sharon has always loved food, as have I. Together, we have eaten across this country, in dives and fine-dining restaurants alike. I can’t even begin to count how many meals we have shared or how many of those meals contained pork. There was a breakfast with bacon in a diner in Wyoming that listed all the different kinds of meats available in big letters at the top of the menu, with eggs and other sides in small letters below. There were pepperoni curled at the edges on our slices of pizza at Sal and Carmine’s, which we’d hit on the way back from the 103rd subway stop before going home across the street. There was pancetta cooked with green beans in some fancy restaurant in Los Angeles — the name I don’t remember — where we splurged on our meager budgets and sat lingering at the table for hours into the evening, feeling rich until our bill came.
It’s no surprise, to me, therefore that she said on the phone before she arrived: “For my first night there, can we have some kind of yummy pork?”
Well, of course.
The joy of this particular pork roast is that we shared it with our dear friends Tita, who lives on the island where we live, and Meri, who was visiting from New York. The four of us had not been in the same room together since my wedding, three years ago. With our daughter, Lu, bopping around the edges, eager to sit on everyone’s laps, this was a mighty estrogen fest.
Danny was at work. That meant I cooked this one on my own, with no help from him or consulting a book.
Everyone there was mighty happy at dinner that night.
Mustard-Rosemary Pork Roast
5 pounds pork loin
Kosher salt and cracked black pepper
1/2 cup Dijon mustard
2 tablespoons chopped fresh rosemary
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
Preheat the oven to 500 degrees. Put a large roasting pan in the oven.
Season the pork loin with salt and pepper on all sides.
Mix the mustard, rosemary, and worcestershire sauce together in a bowl. Using your fingers or a pastry brush (depending on your squeasmishness), smear the mustard mixture all over the pork loin.
Put the pork loin, fat side down, in the roasting pan. It’s going to smoke a bit and make some noise. Don’t worry. Close the oven door.
Sear the pork loin at this high heat for 10 minutes. Turn down the oven to 400 degrees. Cook for another 20 minutes. Take the roast out of the oven and flip over the loin. Slide back into the oven and cook for another 20 minutes, or until the internal temperature on a meat thermometer reads 150 degrees.
Take the roast out of the oven and let it rest until the temperature rises to 160 degrees. Slice into thick pieces and serve. (We had a golden raisin sauce with this pork, along with a roasted vegetable pasta salad.)
Feeds 10.
(You’re going to have leftovers, unless you are feeding a family of 10. We used the leftover pork roast in frittatas, on pizza, and in pork tacos we served with cilantro sauce and grilled jicama. One 5-pound pork roast made 4 meals.)
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