Previous Sunday Dinner

     It was pork roast last Sunday, and I went with "sibling vegetables."  I gave the pork the usual overnight marinade -- balsamic vinegar, soy, a little cider vinegar, plus some garlic and ginger.  The next afternoon, I took it out, gave it a little coarse salt and curry powder and started it in a covered pan on the grill.  I set a timer for three hours.  After twenty minutes or a little more, I added the first set of vegetables.

     They're not closely related but they look alike: an apple and a turnip, peeled and cut in chunks, plus a potato, washed, not peeled and similarly cut up.  The apple and turnip got a little garam masala and the potato got some smoked paprika.

     The next set are siblings: a couple of big parsnips, lightly peeled and sliced, plus a generous handful of baby carrots.  Parsnips are the grown-up version of carrots, with a complex, spicy flavor.

     I followed those with cousins: celery and a fennel bulb (both cut into fork-friendly sections), plus a fennel frond for luck.

     By then, the pan was about full.  I got most of a red onion in and ignored that pan for the rest of the cooking time.  I washed and cut up an assortment of fancy mushrooms, putting them in a grill-top saucepan with more fennel fronds and the rest of the onion, then washed a de-silked a couple of ears of sweet corn.  They got a pat of butter and generous sprinkling of "Mexican street corn" seasoning before I wrapped them up in two layers of aluminum foil and added them to the grill.  By then the grill area was just about full.

     All that takes time.  The grill still had an hour to go, so I did dishes and set up TV trays -- and then realized there was a nice crop of little cherry tomatoes in the garden.

     My little "weed tomatoes" (most of the plants are volunteers returning from last year) are prolific.  They ripen fast and go overripe quickly.  Use 'em or lose 'em!  No larger than marbles, so it's pretty fast to pick the red ones, wash therm, slice them and apply salt and pepper or mixed Italian seasoning.  They get better if you give them a few minutes to sit, so I put them out of the way while I checked the meat, brought in the pans and corn, and set to putting together dinner plates.  It was a feast!

     Leftover mushrooms got put in with the leftover pork roast, and with some sauteed carrot, onion and celery to add some crunch, the remainder made a nice stew later in the week.