The Chef shows you how to butterfly and stuff a pork tenderloin (a video)

Hey, everyone. It's video time.

Life has been a little complicated around here. Pack and clean out a house with a baby. Move in the middle of cold rain and hail. Unpack, for days on end. Walk the baby up and down the house all night, then go to the emergency room. Danny gets the shingles. The baby gets chicken pox. House still not unpacked.

Tell truth, this has been a bit of a rough month.

At least we're still eating well.

These complications have kept us from doing something we really like: shooting a cooking video. Every time we tried, life intervened. But this week, we did it. We shot a video, on Monday. A whole video!

And then the computer ate it. Each shot simply disappeared, instantaneously.

So we shot another one, yesterday. And it stayed! (I put little bits of sticky tape on the back of this video.) And, triumphant, we intended to post it...

and the baby grew more itchy and frantic. The internet had to go away.

But here I am, at 9 pm, the baby finally down, my fingers flying across the keyboard. A video. It's done. It's here.

And it's pork tenderloin, butterflied, pounded out, and stuffed with homemade chorizo.

Enjoy.




We'll share the recipe for chorizo tomorrow. Promise.


We'd like to take this space to announce a new venture of ours (and part of the reason we have been so busy). We're writing another blog, one all about pork:

Pork Knife and Spoon

We're pretty proud of it, and we're having a hoot writing it. Three times a week, we write anything we want about pork. Who knew this could be a job?

And a job it is. To be completely honest about what we're doing, we're being paid to write this blog, by the National Pork Board. You might find you have a sort of feeling about them. Many people do. We'd appreciate it if you keep that feeling to yourself, and not tell us all about it in angry letters. We were approached with this possibility, and after some consideration, jumped right in. To our delight, we have been given the freedom to write what we want, no editing, no censoring.

Just pork.

What we've been hired to do is simple: write about pork. We love pork. That's pretty clear from this website. But we also love the chance to showcase people we love who are making good food, people like Don and Michelle at Volterra restaurant, who offer an incredible pork cheeks and buckwheat polenta dish. Over the course of this year, we'll be featuring the hard work and inventive dishes of many Northwest chefs (and some beyond our environs) involving pork. In these economic times, we'd like to do anything we can to help good restaurants survive. Danny is itching to write about the different cuts of pork, and how best to experience the flavors. We'll also be bringing you the stories of people who raise pigs and make good pork, like the folks at SeaBreeze and Skagit River Ranch, family farmers trying to make it in this world. We actually buy almost all the pork we eat from those two farms. We're lucky enough to have local, sustainable pork near us. Perhaps if we write about these farms, folks who read might want to find a pig farm near them, too.

And of course, we'll talk about bacon.

So come on over to Pork Knife and Spoon for more recipes, videos, giveaways, and hilarious stories about pork. We'd love to see you there.

And for those of you who don't like pork, we can now say that this website will be essentially pork free, after tomorrow's recipe.

Enjoy the tenderloin.