Pork Roast with Dried-Fruit Compote

As the weather cools off and daylight hours become scarce, there's nothing better than coming home to a delicious smelling roast. Last week, we decided to see whether William's Sonoma's Pork Roast with Dried-Fruit Compote would fit that bill.

The recipe comes from the retailer's "Food Made Fast" series (the "Slow Cooker" issue, to be exact), and while "fast" and "slow cooker" are certainly oxymorons, the prep for this roast was unbelievably quick. The ingredient list only necessitates one "fresh" ingredient - the roast itself. Everything else is either a pantry staple (brown sugar), something you could substitute with a pantry staple (dried rosemary) or something you could pick up and keep on hand for whenever the mood for a roast strikes (dried fruit).

The only time-consuming step was browning the pork. Set your alarm an extra 20 minutes early and check the weather or catch up on the news while you work. It's a quick 15-minute task to brown the roast, and with an additional 5 minutes, you've deglazed the pan and are ready to go.

When we arrived at home, we were greeted with some fabulous smells and a roast so tender that it literally fell right off of the bone. It was so good that we didn't even have enough left over for lunches the next day, so we regrettably can't give you the skinny on how well it reheats!

All in all-this was a solid dish for a day when you know you won't have the energy to slave over the stove. And now that we know where to find Williams-Sonoma's stash of online recipes, we'll certainly be back for more!

Minty Tomato Soup

If you read the recipe for Minty Tomato Soup in the September issue of Cooking Light and thought, "Gosh, that sounds time consuming," then congratulations: You are WAY smarter than we are!

After all, tomato soup is delicious, there are only 4 steps in this recipe, and it calls for very few ingredients. What could go wrong?! Well, the lady whose fingernails are still stained orange will tell you, "A LOT"!

Our idea of a good recipe is one that takes 45 minutes, start to finish. This one took a whopping 45 minutes just to get the tomatoes prepared! Careful readers will notice that you handle these tomatoes several times. The first step is cutting the tomatoes in half. (Not so bad, right?) The second step is juicing them. Yes, juicing them - pressing them through a sieve and collecting the juice. (This is where we got concerned.) Finally, you must grate them over a bowl with a box grater, tossing the skins. (What the...?)

Once we'd done all that, we were instructed to mix the reserved tomato juice, salt, red wine vinegar, and chopped mint with the tomatoes and...that's it. No heating, no pureeing - just grated tomatoes and tired hands.

It turns out the rest of the ingredients are for a pesto topping and some really weak toast. Since we'd planned to accompany this with grilled cheese sandwiches - and because we were flat-out bushed! - we called an audible and skipped the toast.

We prepared the pesto as instructed and tossed our lackluster tomato mixture in with it, pureeing everything until smooth. Then we poured the soup into a Dutch oven and warmed it while the grilled cheese sandwiches were being assembled. And then came the true test: taste.

The finished product wasn't bad, even with our improvisations. There wasn't much depth to it, though; it tasted like grated tomatoes with some mint. It could have used some black pepper and maybe a dash of oregano, too. (Our grilled cheese sandwiches were fabulous, if you wondered!)

We'd love to say we'd try this again but the bottom line was that it just didn't make an impression. For our next grilled cheese night, we'll stick to Campbell's!

Gingery Pork Meatballs with Noodles

It seems like everyone's saving their pennies these days, and that fact has prompted Cooking Light to start a new feature called "Budget Cooking". Their recipe for Gingery Pork Meatballs with Noodles (Sept 2010) is advertised with a price tag of $2.06 a serving - let's see if it packs big flavor at a low cost.

The ingredient list is heavy on pantry staples, i.e., things Cooking Light thinks you should already have in your kitchen. Items like breadcrumbs, soy sauce, sesame oil, and some spices aren't counted in the calculation, which allows the "budget" label to be applied to a dish that, at face value, has a laundry lists of components. These items can have high costs if you don't have them on hand, but you're guaranteed to get loads of use out of them, especially if you frequent the magazine's files for recipe ideas. All of the ingredients for this particular recipe are easy to find, including the "wide rice noodles", which we scored from a local Whole Foods-style grocer.

A lot of times, as we skim recipes when creating our weekly menu, we miss the little "idle times" hidden in the instructions. Make sure you budget 30 minutes for the meatball mixture to chill. This would be a great time to chop up the ingredients for the noodles or, if you're super-prepared, to fit in a quick workout or throw in a load of laundry!

Now, the recipe itself says, "cook noodles according to package directions," which would be easy to do...if we could read Japanese. Thankfully, a quick Google search yielded several preparation options. We picked the path of least resistance, soaking the noodles for 30 minutes, then adding as detailed in step 3 of the recipe. Either 30 minutes wasn't enough, or we should've bitten the bullet and boiled them, because we ended up with some seriously crunchy noodles!

At left is the finished product: a lovely, easy-to-assemble taste of Asian cuisine. The meatballs are moist and the ginger, garlic, and soy sauce give them a distinct taste that will breathe life into your dinner repertoire. We took them to work the following day and were pleasantly surprised by how the flavors held up after a turn in the microwave. (No improvement in those noodles, unfortunately, but we'll keep at it!)

This one's a keeper, gang. Tuck it away in your recipe file for a rainy day and wow the pants off of your roommate, significant other, or whoever else is over for dinner!

Banana-Chocolate-Walnut Bread

Let's sweeten up our Saturday, shall we? Last week for work, we attempted the Banana-Chocolate-Walnut Bread (Cooking Light, Oct 2010) for a coworker's birthday. Chocolate, bananas, more chocolate - it seemed like a recipe for success.

The bread was straightforward to put together and required mostly the kinds of staples we tend to keep around our kitchen. (What, you don't keep a bag of chocolate chips on hand at all times?) We popped it in the oven and sat down to relax while it baked the requisite 55 minutes.

It came out of the oven smelling a bit burned, which puzzled us. Generally, our oven temperature runs a little low, so we have to cook things a minute or two longer than stated by the recipe. When we went to pop the chocolate and milk topping mixture into the microwave, we realized why: the 5 tablespoons of melted butter that were supposed to go in the batter were still sitting in the microwave.

Heartbroken, we sliced off an end of the bread and gave it a taste...and, much to our surprise, it wasn't bad at all! Most likely, it was the addition of plain yogurt to the dough plus the bananas themselves that kept things moist and bound despite the lack of fat from the butter. Once we decided that this could still be served to coworkers without destroying our baking reputation, we went ahead with assembling the topping.

Perhaps it was the type of chocolate we used (Nestle semisweet mini chips) or the fat-free milk, but the topping wasn't nearly as thick as shown in the recipe image. But that - and our own inattention to detail! - was our only difficulty with this recipe. All in all, it receives our recommendation for a tasty, anytime treat.

Pasta Stackup with Chicken Sausage

Get a load of this hot mess:

This is what happened when we attempted the Pasta Stackup with Chicken Sausage recipe from Better Homes and Gardens. No you're right, it's not terrible, but now take a peek at how it's supposed to look. So plump and whimsical and fresh, isn't it? And ours? Not so much.

On the bright side, it does taste good, and they're right, it did only take the advertised 25 minutes to prepare, but we're left wondering where in those 4 simple steps we managed to go wrong. (Personally, I think it's the tomatoes we bought.)

We'd recommend this dish with a couple of caveats:

• Instead of slicing the sausage lengthwise in half, consider thirds or quarters instead. The results will be more easily stackable and less wobbly.
• Make sure that everyone you're preparing this for will be present and ready to eat when it comes time to serve. If your family runs on varied work and school schedules and you're planning to make up a plate for someone to enjoy later, you may uncover it to find it a little...wilty.

Good evening, fellow aspiring chefs! It’s Monday, which, if you’re like us, signifies a full, busy day capped off by a lazy night as we catch up on our favorite Sunday night programming.

With that in mind, we’ve selected a recipe marketed by Cooking Light Magazine as quick-to-prepare: Walnut and Rosemary Oven-Fried Chicken. Their test kitchen claims just 30 minutes start to finish – let’s see how we did.

Given the quantity of ingredients, you might think this dish is complex; in fact, it’s very straightforward. The prep work requires a little fine chopping, but nothing your food processor can’t handle in seconds. Furthermore, the chopped items (walnuts and rosemary) are going to the same place at the same time, so you can just toss them in and process them together if you want to save a step.

The chicken is wonderfully flavorful and the buttermilk and Dijon mixture keeps things nice and moist. Overall, we liked this dish, and – bonus! – it took exactly 30 minutes to execute, but we have a few suggestions for anyone trying it at home:

1. Use chicken tenders. If they’re readily available at your grocery store, nab them. It makes for thinner pieces that, to us, work better on salads.
2. Make extra breading. We followed the directions exactly and ran out too soon! Maybe it was due to the aforementioned chicken tenders and their additional surface area, but by the time we realized our error, our hands were too coated in raw chicken to make more.
3. Skip the recommended DIY dressing. The garlic and olive oil accompaniment recommended in the June 2010 issue is good, but not worth the extra fuss of peeling garlic. (Seriously, can anyone do that without making a huge, sticky mess?) Toss your greens with a bottled garlic-infused olive oil, or just use your favorite dressing instead. We won't tell!
4. Add some extra elements. The finished product was good on its own, but after a few bites we threw some halved red grapes and sunflower seeds on top to add a little more oomph.

With those few tweaks, this one might have to go in our standard rotation!

Yuppie Test Kitchen Redux

Hi, friends...it's been a while, hasn't it? Due to some trying events in our personal and professional lives, we've been MIA for a while. But...we're back, baby!

Beginning next week, the Yuppie Test Kitchen will be back in action, with fun new recipes and a preview into our new monthly supper club!

Stay tuned....