By Greg B.  After the failed bacon pinata incident, I had a lot of leftover bacon.  I know, I know, my life is terrible, pounds of extra, delicious bacon and no stupid ideas on how to waste it!  I also was working a lot and one night I needed to just relax, away from work and people and enjoy some dinner.  I looked at the food items I had in my fridge.  Bacon, of course, and a defrosted pork tenderloin.  Then the ideas began to come together. Tenderloin and bacon, reunited at last! (As a weird aside, it is possible for this bacon to be from the same pig that gave me the tenderloin.  I doubt that coincidence would occur, but it’s a weird and fun thing to think about).

The recipe for this is simple.  My plan was to cook the bacon, so that I wouldn’t have to grill the hell out of the tenderloin in order to get to the bacon to cook it.  Who wants dry, gross pork??  not I.  So in a cast iron skillet I crisped 1 pound of bacon, and towards the end of the cooking I added 1 chopped onion and a few chopped cloves of garlic.  I made sure I rendered as much fat from the bacon to start, then cranked up the heat a few notches when I added the onion and garlic.  In a few minutes, I had cooked down the onion to that delicious fat-cooked salty bacon state and turned off the heat, removing the bacon/onion/garlic mixture from the bacon fat (which I subsequently saved in a container for future frying endeavours.  More Belgian fries?  Probably!)

The tenderloin was then laid on a cutting board and I approached it with a fillet knife.  I wanted to cut it so the juices wouldn’t really run out of it when I flipped it on the grill, but so it could still contain 1lb of bacon!  I eventually inserted the knife from one end, cutting a ‘C” shape into the tenderloin, then flipped it open.  Inside, I stuffed as much of the crisped bacon as I could.  This is where I ran into problems.Normally, I keep a roll of twine handy for just this purpose.  Sometimes meats need to be stuffed to be roasted or cooked, and I bought this twine last year for the pig roast (though I upgraded to metal wire for this years’ roast).  Unfortunately, I neglected to search for this before starting to cook the dinner this way.  And now I couldn’t find it.  So, I hurried and put some wooden skewers for kabobs into a water bath, to let them soak while the coals lit.  I already knew they’d burn, but I hoped the water might just stave off the burning a bit longer, long enough to hold the food together while it grilled!

Once the coals were going strong, I skewered up the tenderloin, coated the outside using a mixture of secret spices & salt that I’ve made up in my spice cabinet (we’ll save this for another post… if you’re all lucky) and placed it on the grill, with the fatty side down.  Why fat side down?  So that in the initial cooking phase, the fat can take the brunt of the heat and burn or char, while the rest of the tenderloin can cook.  It’s basically a bit of insulation against burning the meat, while the meat cooks.  After about 15 minutes or so of this cooking, I went out to check on the loin.  It was doing well, some of the juices were oozing slowly out of the portion I had cut open to stuff with bacon, but it seemed to be staying mostly intact.  However, the wooden skewers were singed off at the ends, but the middle part in the meat and meat juices, was holding strong.  So, I rotated the tenderloin, giving it about 5 minutes per side face down on the grill, before finally getting around to the fattier side, then putting the lid on the grill and letting it cook another 10 minutes.

Once this was done cooking, I let the loin sit for about 15 minutes before cutting it open.  It smelled delicious, just roast pork and bacon, nothing ruining this, and no other foods to take away from the delicious pig meal I was about to consume.  On the first few slices the bacon and tenderloin didn’t really hold together as well, but the next day for leftovers when this was sliced it came out looking great.  Bacon, with some onion bits, surrounded by an inch of tenderloin on each side, every side crusted with spices and that delicious grilled meat flavor.  It was a great carnivorous meal, and helped assuage the mental anguish of laboratory work for another day! (as side dishes, I roasted some diced red potato, garlic and onion in aluminum foil with olive oil, salt and pepper, as well as a whole bulb of garlic.  Garlic is delicious this way, I just wish I knew where to find other varieties of it, rather than the usual white, bland grocery store variety).  The meal went down with a nice can of Oskar Blues Dale’s Pale Ale on the side, something a little hoppy to cut the fat, but with some malts to blend in with the grilled, caramelized and sweet onion/pork.