Pork with tart cherries by Maya Corrigan #Recipe

Happy St. Patrick's Day! I wish I had a green recipe to share today. This one's cherry red. After reading about the health benefits of eating tart dried cherries and not finding them in nearby supermarkets, I spotted them at Costco...in a gigantic bag. If all I did was snack on them, the supply would last me  year. So I searched online for recipes using dried cherries and found many. I adapted this one from a recipe on the Montmorency US Tart Cherry site.

The dish for pork medallions with tart cherries serves 4. 

Ingredients

1 to 1 1/4 pound pork tenderloin, cut in one-inch thick medallions

Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

1 cup tart cherry juice

3 Tbsp Montmorency dried tart cherries
2 Tbsp olive oil, divided
1 clove garlic, minced
I shallot, diced
1/2 cup dry red wine *
1 Tbsp maple syrup
1/2 tsp dried thyme

* The recipe I found online suggested using a Cabernet, but the only dry red wine I had was a Malbec. Cabernet would probably make the sauce more robust.

To make the sauce:

Heat 1 tablespoon of oil in a pan over medium heat. Stir in the shallot and garlic and cook for a minute.Add the wine, increase the heat to high, and cook until it’s reduced by half. 

Stir in the cherry juice, dried cherries, maple syrup, and thyme. Cook over high heat for 10 minutes, until the sauce is reduced. Taste, and season with additional salt and pepper, if desired.

To make the pork:  

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.

Place the pork on a cutting board or plate, cut side up. Season both sides with salt and pepper.

Heat a tablespoon of olive oil in a large cast iron skillet, or oven-safe pan. When the oil is very hot, but not smoking, use tongs to add the pork pieces to the skillet, cut side down. 

Cook until golden, about 2 to 4 minutes. Use tongs to flip the medallions over, cooking the other side for 2 to 4 minutes, or until golden.

Lower the heat and cook until the pork reaches 145 degrees F. (Check the temperature with a thermometer.) 

Add the sauce to the skillet, so the pork soaks up some cherry flavor. Serve with rice.

I love fresh cherries, but tasty ones are hard to find except for a few months of the year. These cherries are good for snacking the year round. I find most dried fruit too sweet, so the sweet-tart flavor of these cherries appeals to me.   

READERS: What's your favorite cherry recipe? 

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Maya Corrigan writes the Five-Ingredient Mystery series. It features a young cafe manager and her young-at-heart grandfather solving murders in a Chesapeake Bay town. Each book has five suspects, five clues, and Granddad’s five-ingredient recipes. Maya has taught college courses in writing, literature, and detective fiction. When not reading and writing, she enjoys theater, travel, trivia, cooking, and crosswords.

Visit her website for book news, mystery history and trivia, and easy recipes. Sign up for her newsletter there. She gives away a free book to one subscriber each time she sends out a newsletter. Follow her on Facebook.

A PARFAIT CRIME: Five-Ingredient Mystery #9

Set in a quaint Chesapeake Bay town, the latest novel in Maya Corrigan’s Five-Ingredient Mysteries brings back café manager Val Deniston and her recipe columnist grandfather – a sleuthing duo that shares a house, a love of food and cooking, and a knack for catching killers.

At the site of a fatal blaze, Val’s boyfriend, a firefighter trainee, is shocked to learn the victim is known to him, a woman named Jane who belonged to the local Agatha Christie book club—and was rehearsing alongside Val’s grandfather for an upcoming Christie play being staged for charity. Just as shocking are the skeletal remains of a man found in Jane’s freezer. Who is he and who put him on ice?

After Val is chosen to replace Jane in the play, the cast gathers at Granddad’s house to get to work—and enjoy his five-ingredient parfaits—but all anyone can focus on is the bizarre real-life mystery. When it’s revealed that Jane’s death was due to something other than smoke inhalation, Val and Granddad retrace the victim’s final days. As they dig into her past life, their inquiry leads them to a fancy new spa in town—where they discover that Jane wasn’t the only one who had a skeleton in the cooler.

Read an excerpt and see where to buy A Parfait Crime.  

Praise for A Parfait Crime

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