July 8, 2013 Lunch – Millennium 2000 Dinner - Pork tenderloin, Apple and Onion tapa with squash and kale and chard

July 8, 2013 Lunch – Millennium 2000   Dinner - Pork tenderloin, Apple and Onion tapa with squash and kale and chard

Willy was at home, so we decided to go to Millennium 2000 for what has become our favorite father and son lunch.  Two number 21s with extra herbs and sauce.  The dish, a bowl layered from bottom to top with shredded lettuce, herbs and bean sprouts, then rice vermicelli noodles, and then topped with grilled pork and pork egg rolls served with fish sauce, is now $7.75, so one can now say that Millennium is moving upscale.  I seems to be following Café Trang’s lead by now using better quality ingredients and charging higher prices.  A better cut of pork is now used that is completely lean.  The egg rolls are still wonderful with their thin crisp skinned rice noodle wrappers. 

 

I wanted to cook the pork tenderloin we had thawed out and decided to make our favorite Pork tapa dish from José Andrés Tapa Cookbook, A Taste of Spain in America.

Each package of pork tenderloins contains two tenders, so I doubled the recipe and peeled and sliced two medium white onions and two red delicious apples and the was ready to start the dish.  I took down the large copper sauté pan and put the requisite 4 Tbsps. of Sleman’s Chilean olive oil and 2 Tbsps. of butter into the pan and sautéed the apples and then removed them and sautéed the onions and cut up a yellow squash and threw it in.  Then we put in the pork tenders cut in half and some kale and chard and put the skillet into the oven to bake at 250˚ for about 45 minutes. 

 

 

 

 

It still was not cooked thoroughly, so we cooked it a bit longer than we should have, but Suzette did not want the center to be any redder than light pink; surely not the deep red color in the recipe’s picture.  We finished making the sauce with French Calvados (instead of Spanish Brandy) and chicken stock.  I opened the bottle of 2010 Campo Viejo Rioja that Jim and Diane had brought and we heated up the PPI rice from Friday evening and sliced the pork and stacked it on top of the apple and onion mixture that we laid on top of a pile of rice.   I love pork cooked this way.  The sweetness of the onions and fruitiness of the apples flavored with calvados and chicken stock is heavenly, especially with a good Spanish Rioja like Campo Viejo.  Thank you, Diane and Jim.

Cake and Mango/Peach ice cream for dessert. Voila!

Bon Appétit