Dinner Tonight: Easy Pork Loin

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Dinner was fast and easy to make today. Here’s what we had:

Pork Loin – we had a couple pork loins in the freezer from our local farm (grass fed pork, no antibiotics, the animals aren’t fed soy meal or animal by-products, etc.), and I literally threw them into the crock-pot at 1:00 this afternoon when they were rock-hard frozen. (We usually eat at 5:30 when Kent gets home, and I often forget to figure out dinner until late in the day!) I put them on high and poured in just the juice from a can of pineapple – save the pineapple for later (the kind with 100% juice, no high-fructose corn syrup), another small can of pineapple juice, about 1/4 – 1/2 c. of fermented soy sauce, and some fresh-crushed garlic. I left it on high until 4:00 when it was about done, and then I put it on low so it didn’t dry out. About 5:00 I tossed in the pineapple to warm it up and eat with the pork.
Buttered Noodles – I started these boiling at 5:10. When they were done, I tossed them with plenty of butter, sea salt & pepper. (Try to use organic and whole wheat pasta. Or try rice pasta if you’re avoiding gluten, or if you are concerned about the phytic acid.)
Fruit Crisp, without the crisp – at 5:10 after I got the noodles going, I began to wonder what else I was going to serve. I remembered I had some frozen fruit to use and I threw this together to try. (The fruit isn’t organic, but at least it’s mostly local and from a company that doesn’t use genetically modified crops/GMO’s.) I’d seen similar recipes before, but always the kind of hot-fruit salads that need to be baked – I knew I didn’t have time for that… So I put a little maple syrup (1/4 c.) in the bottom of a medium sized stainless steel saucepan. (No Teflon or aluminum!) Then I added frozen peaches and frozen apples. (I’m sure any fresh fruits would probably work well, too.) As they heated up and the ice on them melted (OK, they’d been in my freezer a while), it made more juice and I sprinkled in a little cinnamon in too. (Careful though, once I used too much in a similar recipe and my brother said it tasted like potpourri.) It turned out great and tasted good with the pork.