Vegetable Stuffed Pork Tenderloin en Croute with Creole Mustard Cream Sauce

I cooked this Emeril Lagasse dish last week for my brother and his family. Although not hard, it's time consuming enough that you might want to save it for a special meal. It's delicious and makes a lovely presentation. Don't let the "en croute" part scare you off. It's store-bought puff pastry, which is very easy to use.

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For the tenderloin and pastry:
2 1/2 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 (3/4-pound each) pork tenderloins, trimmed of all fat and silver skin
1/2 teaspoon plus a pinch salt
3/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 1/2 cups diced onions
1/2 cup diced celery
3/4 cup diced, seeded green bell pepper (I know it's an important part of the creole trilogy but, gasp, I don't care for green bell pepper. I used a combination of red, orange and yellow for some nice color. I also added some diced fennel bulb.)
1/2 cup diced green onions
1/2 teaspoon fresh chopped thyme leaves
Pinch cayenne (I used 1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes instead.)
2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley leaves
1 (17.25-ounce) package frozen puff pastry (2 sheets), thawed
1/4 cup plain bread crumbs
1/2 cup grated Parmesan
1 large egg
1 tablespoon water

For the Creole mustard cream sauce:
1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons Creole mustard
1 1/3 cups chicken stock
2/3 cup heavy cream
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

For the tenderloin and pastry:
Line a large baking sheet with aluminum foil and grease the center with 1/2 tablespoon of the butter. Set aside.

Season the pork tenderloins on all sides with 1/2 teaspoon of the salt and 1/2 teaspoon of the pepper. Heat the vegetable oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add the tenderloins; reduce the heat to medium, and brown evenly on all sides. Cook, turning frequently, until the meat reaches an internal temperature of 110 degrees F, 10 to 12 minutes. Remove the tenderloins from the skillet and allow to cool for 30 minutes.

In a clean, large skillet, heat the remaining butter over medium heat. Add the onions, celery, green bell peppers, and green onions. (I added about 1/2 teaspoon of red pepper flakes at this point and didn't add the cayenne.) Saute until vegetables are tender and any released juices have evaporated, 6 to 8 minutes, stirring frequently. Add the thyme, 1/4 teaspoon pepper, a pinch of salt, and a pinch of cayenne, and cook for 1 additional minute. Remove the vegetables from the skillet and place in a bowl. Stir in the parsley and allow mixture to cool for about 10 minutes.

Set aside 1/2 cup of the vegetable mixture for the sauce. Divide the remaining vegetable mixture into 2 equal portions.

On a lightly floured work surface, lightly roll 1 sheet of the puff pastry to a 12 by 13-inch rectangle. Sprinkle 2 tablespoons of the bread crumbs evenly over the puff pastry, leaving a 1-inch border around the edges. Spread 1/4 cup of the grated cheese over the breadcrumbs.

Pat the seared tenderloins dry. Spread 1 half of the vegetable mixture onto half of the puff pastry, over the breadcrumbs and cheese. Place 1 tenderloin over the vegetables, so that it is parallel to the shorter side of the pastry. Whisk together the egg and 1 tablespoon of water. Brush the egg wash around the 1-inch border of the pastry. Gently lift the pastry around the tenderloin, and continue rolling the tenderloin in the pastry, jellyroll style. Use the egg wash to seal the edges of the pastry. Cut away any excess pastry and seal the edges closed by pinching them together, and folding them under the tenderloin.

Place the tenderloin, seam-side down, on the prepared baking sheet and repeat the process with the remaining vegetables, pastry, bread crumbs, cheese, and tenderloin. Make a decorative cross-hatch pattern across the tops of the pastries, being careful not to cut through the pastry. (Omit this step if it makes you nervous. It's purely decorative.) Brush the tops and sides of the pastries evenly with the remaining egg wash. Refrigerate the tenderloins in pastry for 30 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.

For the Creole mustard cream sauce: Heat the reserved 1/2 cup of vegetables in a medium saucepan over medium-high heat. Add the flour and cook, stirring, for 2 minutes. Stir in the mustard and continue to cook for 1 more minute. Slowly whisk in the chicken broth and heavy cream. Bring mixture to a simmer and cook, over medium-low heat until sauce is reduced to about 1 1/2 cups, about 20 minutes. Season sauce with 1/4 teaspoon of salt and 1/4 teaspoon of freshly ground black pepper. Set sauce aside and serve warm or at room temperature.

Place the tenderloins in the preheated oven and bake for 20 to 22 minutes, or until golden brown and an instant-read thermometer inserted in the center registers 150 degrees F. Remove from the oven and let rest for 10 minutes before serving. Serve sliced, with the Creole Mustard Cream Sauce.

Looking for more good recipes and projects? Check out the Make it From Scratch Carnival. This recipe and a lot more appear there this week!

Flowers, Flowers Everywhere!

This month's Stadler Nursery post is about Spring of course!

April is one of my favorite months of the year even though, as the manager of three garden centers, it’s also one of my busiest months of the year. The reasons I love April are many. From the warm days and cool nights to the bursts of color everywhere as the cherries, pears, crabapples, redbuds and dogwoods burst into bloom. Wide swaths of bright pansies and cheery clumps of daffodils just sing out Spring to me.

This April has been especially interesting in the garden as everyone here in the Mid-Atlantic has been anxiously waiting to see how their garden plants fared after back-to-back snowstorms in February dumped record-breaking amounts of heavy wet snow that stuck around for weeks. To make things even more interesting, we had several days of temperatures over 90 degrees in early April, a time when our high for the day is usually in the mid-60s. Talk about extremes!

One result of our super-heated April is that everything seems to be several weeks ahead of schedule in the garden. My big beautiful crabapple was in full bloom the first week of April. I don’t usually see that show until after April 20. The Kwanzan cherries are all in full bloom this week. That is generally a late April into early May event. A number of the late spring perennials are up and flowering all over my garden. While it’s very pretty, I’m keeping my fingers crossed. Our projected last frost date for this area is still a week or more away. A frost now would do quite a bit of damage to all the premature soft tender growth everywhere.

On a larger scale, this area is home to a number of orchards. I’m sure the farmers are joining me in anxiously watching the nighttime temperature forecasts. A freeze now, with all the fruit trees in bloom or even setting fruit, could seriously impact their income for the year.

If a frost, or worse yet a freeze, is forecast, the farmers have a few methods they can employ in an attempt to minimize the damage, from irrigation to smudge pots to large commercial fans that keep the air moving. For the home gardener, the best defense is to cover those tender shoots with sheets and towels. Never use plastic to cover plants. The heat will build up quickly under the plastic as soon as the sun comes up the next morning and do more damage than the frost would have done in the first place.

Fortunately, the ten-day forecast for my area offers night temperatures above freezing, so I’m probably safe, especially since I live in the downtown area of my town which offers a slightly warmer microclimate than out in the surrounding countryside. At least I was able to resist the siren call of those summer-like days last week and didn’t rush out to plant annuals and summer vegetables. There’s plenty of time for that. For now, I’m just going to enjoy my favorite month of April.

Cheryl lives with her husband and their three cats in a 100-year-old house in the beautiful state of Maryland. She has a degree in horticulture from the University of Maryland and has been the manager of Stadler Nurseries in Maryland and Virginia for over 20 years. Become a fan of Stadler Nurseries on Facebook to find out what's going on in the garden world!

Are Your Kids Back Home?

So you followed all the rules. You got married. You had your babies. You went to play group. You sat at tiny picnic tables helping your kids sell lemonade. You baked a million cupcakes. You joined the PTA. You sat through endless school sporting events. You were queen of the carpool and served on a gazillion school committees. You went camping with your little Boy and Girl Scouts even though you hate camping. You worked hard and you scraped and saved to put them through college. Finally they were off and your life could begin! Things were going great. Except four (or five) years later your kids were back.

You're not stupid, you knew your kids were staying out late (or all night) when they were at college. You knew they were doing all sorts of things of which you would not approve. But you didn't really know so you slept soundly. Now they're back. Now you find yourself up half the night again listening for that car door to slam. You're actually meeting the people with whom they are hanging out and you don't like them.

Your house, which was so neat and so peaceful for the last few years is again turned upside down. You are constantly having to pick up after people who, for all intents and purposes, are adults, albeit young ones. You can't find anything because things are no longer where you left them. How long, you wonder, is this going to last? What happened to all those plans you made for the time when your kids were gone? Are you ever going to get to do them?

Are your birdies back in the nest? How are you dealing with it? Are you picking up after them, doing their laundry and cooking their dinner? Or are you charging them rent and forcing them to fend for themselves? Have you made some rules or are you letting things ride? My son will graduate from college in May. Since I sold my house and am living the life of a nomad this is not a problem I anticipate having but I'm curious how other people are dealing with it.

In the interest of full disclosure I have to admit that, as a little birdie, I came back back to the nest for a time and while I like to think that my parents were thrilled beyond measure to be graced with my company, I now suspect that was not entirely true!

Weekly Wednesday

This week's Weekly Wednesday post at Make It From Scratch is a really neat goat cheese pasta. The trick is letting a block of herbed goat cheese melt into a delicious sauce. I love this one!

How to Put Your Kids Through College

This guest post is contributed by Emily Thomas, who writes on the topics of online college degrees. She welcomes your comments at her email Id: emily.thomas31@gmail.com.

If you would like to submit a guest post for SimplyForties please check the guidelines here.

From the moment they were born, you probably started worrying about how your child would be able to get a college education. Costs are rising annually, competition for schools always seems to get fiercer, and the economy makes any major investment seem daunting. So how do you do it? The bad news is there's no fool-proof plan to make sure you're completely prepared for any financial obligations that come your way. But there are a few things you can do to greatly increase the odds of success when it comes to sending your young ones to school.

Start right away. It's never too early to start saving for your child's education, but it's also never too late. Many parents think that if they don't have a college fund set up by the time their child hits kindergarten that it's a lost cause, but that couldn't be further from the truth. There's never a bad time to begin setting aside money to use for education. Set up a dedicated fund that will be used for college-related expenses. Talk with your banker to find out what kind of investment plan will yield the most return for you.

Look for trade-offs. As your child reaches high school age and begins to look more seriously at where to go to college, you'll be presented with opportunities to spend a little money in the present to save a lot more in the future. The perfect example of this is in SAT/ACT preparation courses and software. Spending $200 on a course or expensive set of prep material and discs can seem like a lot now, but it's more than offset by the savings you'll get when your child's test scores result in better scholarship offers.

Avoid "sticker shock". Seeing the price tag on a year of higher education can feel like shopping for a luxury car: They want me to pay what? It's important to remember, though, that scholarships and grants can really help cut that figure down to something much more manageable. A variety of factors, from your child's test scores to their prospective major, will enable you to seek out financial assistance that will make sending your child to school a little easier.

Consider all options. It's important to stress to your child the importance of not just education but smart investing. For many young people, attending a community college for two years and then transferring to a larger university is a smart play, and you'll feel the financial savings. You can still give your child the gift of a good education, and you won't go broke doing it.

Since I'm putting my own kid through college right now, I can say that there's a little more to it than this but these are all good suggestions! What are your strategies for financing your child's education?

Southwest Chicken, Corn & Black Bean Salad

I've been with my folks down in Florida all this past week and I'm sorry to be heading out this morning. While I was here, my mother served this great salad. The black beans, yellow corn and red tomatoes make it a pretty dish. We omitted the meat but if you left it in, it would make a hearty dinner.

4 Servings

10 c torn romaine
1 15-oz can black beans, rinsed & drained
1 1/2 c chopped, cooked chicken or turkey (we left the meat out)
1 1/2 c red and/or yellow cherry tomatoes, halved
1 c whole kernel corn

1/2 c reduced-calorie Caesar salad dressing (we used Vidalia Lite)
2 tsp chili powder
1/2 tsp cumin
1/2 c broken tortilla chips (we omitted this)
2 Tbs snipped fresh cilantro or parsley

In a large bowl combine romaine, black beans, corn, chicken and tomatoes.

In a small bowl whisk together salad dressing, chili powder and cumin.
Pour dressing over salad, toss gently to coat. Sprinkle with tortilla
chips and snipped cilantro.

Books, Do They Have a Future?

I love my Kindle. I've loved it since the moment I un-boxed it and have loved it ever since. I feel virtuous in an eco-friendly way for owning it. For me there has been no downside.

Last weekend I walked into fantastic, historic, famous Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, and the downside hit me like a ton of, well, books. If everyone carried a Kindle (or any other sort of e-reader) what would happen to bookstores? What about libraries? As a great lover of both I began to ponder their disappearance. I love books. I love everything about them. When the Kindle first came out I, like a lot of people, didn't want to give up the feel of a book in my hands. In my current life as a nomad the Kindle makes sense and I'm thrilled to have it but no bookstores and no libraries? Could that be borne?

I'm absolutely, positively certain that the future will see the end of the printed word. It may not be my generation's future and possibly not even my son's generation but I believe it is at hand. I picture bookstores becoming sterile places with computer terminals for perusing choices. You'd plug your reader into a handy cable, download your selection, pay with stored credit card information and walk away. No human contact necessary. Then I realized that this scenario would more likely be played out at home from personal computer terminals and online catalogs, just like we e-reader people do it now. Bookstores might become small convenience kiosks in airports or other gathering places. A single computer terminal for those on the go. No brick and mortar location, however futuristic, needed.

What about libraries? A lot of libraries already have their collections online. We love the convenience of reserving and renewing our selections from home. How about the ability to check out your book, download it to your e-reader for a limited time and then have it magically clear away? Many libraries already offer the ability to download audio books, which expire and are deleted after a week or so. Can e-reader versions of printed books be far behind? I remember how much I disliked it when the card catalog was replaced by a computer terminal. What would it be like to have the whole library reduced to one?

My hometown of Alpine, Texas, is currently in the process of building a new library. It's an exciting project that the whole town is getting behind and the walls are going up. The theme of the new library is "the community's living room", which I love. To me it's the vision of a perfect library. Big overstuffed chairs, small tables around which to gather and discuss, toddler time and free movies on Tuesday nights. That's a library (and a bookstore). I love the idea of less trees being needed for all those books, magazines and newspapers and don't think, ultimately, that we'll have much choice in the matter but it makes me sad.

Will remembering a time when bookstores and libraries were places to go to choose a book and sit down for a read amongst other book lovers become something that dates us in the way that remembering 45's and soda fountains do?

I still love my Kindle but the future that it reflects is one for which I am not so sure I'm ready.

Weekly Wednesday

My Weekly Wednesday post is up at Make It From Scratch. This week is Ginger-Lime Marinated Shrimp. It's easy and you'll love it. Serve it to company and they'll want the recipe. What else could you want?

Women of War

On my way to Florida, where I'll be spending this week with my parents, I stayed the night Sunday with my aunt and uncle in Macon, Georgia. We had a lovely visit including an afternoon spent touring around Macon. My aunt is very knowledgeable about her town and shared much of its history with me.

One of our stops was at a memorial to the women of the Confederacy and it really stayed with me. I'm sure there were women, dressed up as men who fought in that war but this memorial commemorates the women who stayed at home and kept things going through some extremely tough times. it was good to see them recognized.

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One side of the monument, which is an obelisk, perhaps twenty feet in height, bears a three dimensional image of a women with one hand on a child's head and one on a spinning wheel. I suspect this is the image that their men held dear while they fought their lost cause. I also suspect that the reality for a lot of women bore a closer resemblance to what went on in the movie Cold Mountain. Be they share croppers or plantation owners, those women had a rough go of it.

There is a scene in that movie where Nicole Kidman's character, who is a daughter of privilege left alone by the war, is trying to build a fence with Catherine Zellweger's character, who is a practical backwoods kind of girl. The Zellweger character is astonished by the lack of useful, real world skills that the other woman possesses. Kidman's character throws up her hands and says she possesses many skills; she can play the piano, she can sing, she can host large dinners, she can speak French and she can embroider beautifully. What she can not do is plow, plant, harvest, build, hunt or do any of the things she needs to do to survive.

I suspect this was the situation a lot of women found themselves in when their bright boys marched off. In addition to finding ways to feed and clothe themselves and keep their farms going, women left alone are prime targets for raping, pillaging and looting and had to protect themselves against that as well. How many of us would be able to do it? Some were successful; many were not.

The opposite side of the memorial is a three dimensional carving of a woman giving water to what appears to be a dying soldier. That was another reality. As things started to go badly for the southern soldiers, the wounded began to pour into southern cities and towns and the women had to tend to them. If you've ever been in Georgia or Louisiana or Mississippi in the summer you can imagine what that must have been like. No air conditioning, no clean, sterile hospitals, just row after row of filthy, wounded, dying men to care for. The smell must have been overwhelming. The women, like they do everywhere then and now, rallied and did what they could in circumstances that I doubt they could ever have imagined before the start of the war.

This is a monument to the women of the South, it is Macon, Georgia, after all, but this is not a monument designed to praise a lost way of life or make a political statement about the issues over which that war was fought. It is a small remembrance for a seldom recognized group of people who were fighting their own, very different kind of war back home. Whether it be the Civil War, the World Wars, Vietnam or Iraq, while the soldiers are off doing different things in faraway places, there are a whole bunch of people at home getting on with the business of living, made much more difficult by having to do it alone and while worrying about the safety of their loved ones. I'm glad Macon, Georgia, thought to remember and recognize them.

Although I've not seen it, i know there is a Civil War Women's Memorial in Gettysburg commemorating the efforts of all women and specifically the efforts of Elizabeth Thorn who, while six months pregnant, buried the first 91 casualties of the Battle of Gettysburg. Do you know of any others? Or for that matter, do you know of any other memorials to the non-combatant women of any war? Please share them if you do.

Braided Easter Bread

Happy Easter everyone! Even if you don't celebrate Easter, this bread is fun to make and very appropriate for spring!

Serves 10

• 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour, divided
• 1/4 cup white sugar
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 (.25 ounce) package active dry yeast
• 2/3 cup milk
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 2 eggs
• 5 whole raw eggs, dyed if desired (don't pre-boil the eggs, they will bake along with the bread)
• 2 tablespoons butter, melted

1. In a large bowl, combine 1 cup flour, sugar, salt and yeast; stir well. Combine milk and butter in a small saucepan; heat until milk is warm and butter is softened but not melted.
2. Gradually add the milk and butter to the flour mixture; stirring constantly. Add two eggs and 1/2 cup flour; beat well. Add the remaining flour, 1/2 cup at a time, stirring well after each addition. When the dough has pulled together, turn it out onto a lightly floured surface and knead until smooth and elastic, about 8 minutes.
3. Lightly oil a large bowl, place the dough in the bowl and turn to coat with oil. Cover with a damp cloth and let rise in a warm place until doubled in volume, about 1 hour.
4. Deflate the dough and turn it out onto a lightly floured surface. Divide the dough into two equal size rounds; cover and let rest for 10 minutes. Roll each round into a long roll about 36 inches long and 1 1/2 inches thick. Using the two long pieces of dough, form a loosely braided ring, leaving spaces for the five colored eggs. Seal the ends of the ring together and use your fingers to slide the eggs between the braids of dough.
5. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Place loaf on a buttered baking sheet and cover loosely with a damp towel. Place loaf in a warm place and let rise until doubled in bulk, about 45 minutes. Brush risen loaf with melted butter.
6. Bake in preheated oven for 50 to 55 minutes, or until golden.

Enjoy!

GPS - A Favorite Thing

My sense of direction is extremely poor. Add to that a very limited memory and you have someone who can’t find her way out of a paper bag. My days have always consisted of lots of wrong turns and endless late arrivals. I purchased a GPS off the Woot a couple of years ago and it literally changed my life.

In the past, when I was visiting someone, I either went where they took me or stayed in the house. Venturing out on my own was an exercise in frustration in which I was very unlikely to indulge. The difference the GPS has made in my life was brought home to me in a very real way the other day. I’m staying at my sister’s house in Georgia this week. She lives in a gated community about 20 miles west of Atlanta in what is still a fairly rural area full of lots of winding roads. The other day she and her children had some appointments and left me home alone. Normally I would have stayed in the house, watching TV or cooking or reading a book, awaiting their return. Instead, armed with my trusty GPS I zoomed over to my storage unit, went to the grocery store and the post office and took a little drive through her local town before returning home. It was a real pleasure.

Nowadays I can sally forth with confidence that my GPS (my nephews named her Gia) will save me from myself. I detour; I follow intriguing road signs; I act on whims and caprices. Gia has set me free.

My GPS is a Garmin Street Pilot. She’s not perfect. Because I bought this one on the Woot it was not the latest model and doesn’t have a lot of options. If I were buying another I’d get one with more variation in the way you can set your route. I’d like to be able to choose things like use (or avoid) the freeway, take me on the scenic route or get me there as quickly as possible. That issue notwithstanding, I love having a GPS and can’t imagine doing without one again!

Do you have a GPS? Do you use it? Do you love it?