A New Twist on a Pasta Salad

Since my family has been so finicky lately, I decided to up the ante. Tonight's dinner was a pork loin roast with apples and onions and a pasta salad. Now, you may recall that I made a similar salad for our family's Easter dinner, but tonight's version has a different vinaigrette, giving it an entirely different identity.

I added broccoli (which I later blanched for a few seconds), red bell pepper, carrot, green onion, celery and roma tomato.

I cooked farfalle pasta for the dish.

On a whim, I decided to toss in a few blue cheese crumbles. Unfortunately, I didn't have any feta cheese on hand, or I would have used that instead.

Now it's time for the vinaigrette. The ingredients: one lemon, juiced, dijon mustard, salt, black pepper and olive oil. After tasting, I decided to add a bit of honey to round out the flavors.

What do you know? My family actually liked this. I had begun to give up on them.

What's that, you say? What about the pork roast? Once again, I forgot to take the after pictures. But since you asked so nicely, I will give you an idea of what you missed.

Earlier in the day, I prepared a marinade of balsamic vinegar, honey, dijon mustard, salt, black pepper, a smashed garlic clove and canola oil. The pork loin marinated for several hours in the refrigerator.

And now it's time to cook. I went out on my deck and pinched off a couple of small sprigs of my now-growing thyme, and a few leaves off my new sage plant. Then I roughly chopped some onion, and pulled a cup of homemade turkey stock out of the freezer. After some thought, I also grabbed an apple and sliced that thinly.

I seared the pork loin in canola oil, added the sage, thyme, apple and onion and allowed them to cook for a bit before adding the remaining marinade and the turkey stock. I placed a remote temperature probe into the thickest part of the meat and baked this in a 350 degree oven until the meat reached an internal temperature of 140 degrees.

I pulled the meat out and covered it with foil. I then placed the pot back on the stove top and reduced the liquid. After about 10 minutes, I sliced the pork loin and laid it on top of the apples and onions.

Now, you clever readers might notice that there are no more pictures. I really do need to work on remembering to take pictures of the finished dishes. Bad blogger, bad blogger.