It has been a long time since I had the time to cook. Since it was a long weekend, I decided to prepare dinner. I initially wanted to fire up the grill and do some yakitori type thing (inspired by dinner at Shin Kushiya last week, which was amazing by the way). However, I changed my mind when I got home and saw a bottle of red wine that I had been keeping for some time.

It was probably kept for too long to drink, but could still be used for cooking. I had been thinking of using it to prepare something, but never really had any ideas till today. I remembered wanting to try doing reduced red wine sauce, and today was as good a day as any to do so. I figured meat would go well with the red wine reduction, and so I wanted to get a rack of lamb. However, I couldn’t get any and so got a whole boneless pork loin instead. Instead of grilling it slice by slice, i figured i’d roast the whole thing in the oven, together with potatoes, carrots, and onions.

I rubbed the entire pork lion with olive oil, black pepper, salt, herbs, paprika powder, and let it sit for a while in a casserole dish (surrounded with whole garlic cloves) before covering it with tin foil and chucking it into the oven.

At the same time, I had poured half a bottle of wine into a saucepan, thrown in a couple of garlic cloves, some rosemary leaves, two bay leaves, and a few tablespoons of sugar, and just let it boil and simmer till it reduced by more than half, and became slightly thickened. It was a little sweet, spiced with the herbs, and still had that slightly alcoholic taste!

While that was boiling, I cut the potatoes, carrots and onions into large pieces, and fried them lightly for a while till the edges were browned. Just before the pork was done, I spooned some of the red wine sauce over it, and put the potatoes, carrots, and onions around it. This time, i put it back into the oven (minus tin foil) for another half hour or so, so that everything would be nicely browned.

During roasting, the drippings from the pork (mixed with all the herbs, spices and red wine sauce) would collect in the dish. I spooned out a bowl of it, so that it could be used as a gravy if the pork got too dry. There was also about a bowl of red wine sauce, and that went very well with the pork.

Although the pork ended up being a little tough and dry, the extra gravy helped, and I must say it tasted quite good considering this attempt was pretty much a stab in the dark.

Here’s what the it looked like…you can see that it is a little dry…i suppose next time i’ll have to roast it for a shorter period of time.

…and here it is, after being sliced and served with the potatoes, carrots, and onions…