Before- Prepped Pork tenderloin
Cooking is definitely not my forte. At all. Ever.
I’ve been known to turn sweet creamed corn into salty creamed corn. I have a hard time boiling eggs, and I can’t stir fry anything to save my life. Once, I even screwed up rice. Seriously, I shamed my entire lineage of Chinese ancestors. I mean all I had to do was wash the rice, put some water in the pot and hit the button labeled “cook”. Yea…
After- Tender and juicy pork tenderloin for lunch!
As much as I love food, I never thought I’d be interested in cooking, but I guess I had to start from the bottom. My office fortunately has a small conventional oven which I use to make fabulous and easy meals for my lunch. The little oven is a God send! Plus, it helps me cut out all the bad junk food and saves me a ton of money.
I bought some pork tenderloin center cuts at Kroger and just winged it. I added chopped garlic and marinated them in an Asian sauce called Oyster sauce. It doesn’t really taste like oysters…
…it’s just a sweet marinade. Very much like Hoisin sauce lots of people like to add to their pho. Anyway, I also added just a little bit of olive oil to help the meat soak up the marinade. Stabbed the pork a few times with a fork to help it soak up the marinade as well. All these tips I got from friends and what I could find online. The prep I can do, but the actual act of cooking is still terrifying.
I also chopped up some mushrooms and carrots and added garlic pepper for fun and brought all my raw ingredients with me to work along with some foil. I basically wrapped all the raw ingredients in the foil into an envelop and stuck it in the oven to cook while I finished my work. I baked it at 350 degrees for 20 minutes, then cut open the foil and baked it for about 12-15 more minutes. Voila! It was actually delicious and came out a lot better than I expected. See…no real act of cooking. My mini-oven’s got this!
I basically use this same method to bake chicken, salmon, and tilapia and I mix up the veggies according to what I am in the mood for. There are tons of recipes on the internet and it has definitely been fun trying them all out.
