Apricot-dijon mustard glazed Pork Tenderloin

Hey honey, what’s for dinner? Apricot-dijon mustard glazed pork with a cheesy cauliflower side dish. How good does that sound? I bet you that your mouth is watering right now. That’s what we had for dinner last night. The apricot-dijon mustard glaze was so good and it was made from scratch. This meal was much more time consuming to make than the last meal but that’s ok because it was worth it.

My wife found this recipe in the Cooking Light magazine and it did not disappoint. This meal reminds me of why we like to cook. We had the whole family in the kitchen while I made this dinner. When you put your heart and soul into a dish it tastes so damn good. That’s the definition of comfort food to me. When you can taste the love in the food. People always say they crave biscuits and gravy as their comfort food, which has never really appealed to me. That probably has something to do with growing up in Colorado and not the south, but you see what I’m getting at. You can check out the instruction video and see how easy it is to make a dinner  from scratch. I know most of us say we do not have time to cook like this, but I’d argue that you just do not have your priorities straight. Corral all your family and get them into the kitchen while you or your significant other cooks. It’ll make for a better family, I’ll promise you that.

What’s the Macro breakdown?

This meal had more calories because of the cheese and most likely the apricot preserves we used in the recipe. The cheesy cauliflower was most likely to be blamed for the fat content in this meal. We are not scared of fat so we loaded it up. Each serving was about 494 k/calories. Each serving has about 37g of carbs, 29g of fat and 43g of protein. I say about because we do not really measure or weigh our foods. I’m sure some of you are screaming at the screen, “but Dusty how do you really know?!”.

The truth is I don’t, but I learned a long time ago that you need to focus on the 20% that creates 80% of the difference. In the past, I’ve weighed each and everything I ate. I tracked every calorie to the T. Do you know what happened? I ended up falling off of my diet plan. I’ve learned to be flexible with what I’m eating. I roll with the idea that I need to eat protein that is the size of my open palm and my carbohydrate side is the size of my closed fist. If you feel the best thing for you to do is weigh and measure your food then go right ahead. Just don’t let it cause you to fall back into your bad habits.

What did we like about this meal?

We loved the scratch made apricot-mustard glaze that went on top of the pork. It was the highlight of the meal. When you make something from scratch it tastes different. It’s a great metaphor for life. Anything that’s time consuming is worth your time and the end product always reflects your time and effort. The cheesy cauliflower was a great side dish and it was almost good enough to get Carson to eat it. He loves his green trees (broccoli) but he wasn’t so sure about the white trees with cheese.

What would we change next time?

We had a great debate about how long to cook the cauliflower. Liz thought the 25 minutes in the oven was perfect while I would have liked the cauliflower to cook longer. Either way, there weren’t leftovers of the cauliflower. We ate it all. That’s also what we would change next time, save some for leftovers. Secondly, we cooked the pork for 33 minutes in total even though the video said 18 total minutes. We didn’t have our instant read thermometer so we went extra time to make sure it was done. Lucky for us the pork was not over cooked, only a little past perfect! Finally, if you need to limit your calories you can cut the amount of cheese we used in half or even leave it out altogether. Roasted cauliflower is awesome by itself.

Watch the YouTube video here!