Defeat Revisted

Previously on A Food Year, I attempted to make Sweet and Sour Pork with poor results. I decided to try a completely different recipe with a mostly different preparation method that was recommended to me back then when I failed. Unfortunately for me, I'd lost that recipe over the months between then and now and I was once again winging an attempt at sweet and sour pork. The only part that I remember is that a slice of cucumber was wrapped around it after cooking, so I went with that.

With the Sweet and Sour Pork Tenderloin the results were much better. I also like the idea of using ketchup to turn the sauce red instead of food coloring, which was what I had in the original recipe which made it more pink than anything. I suppose that tomato paste, vinegar and sugar could be substituted for ketchup with identical results, if you were looking to use up a half used jar of tomato paste or didn't happen to have ketchup for some reason. The sauce nicely combined both sweet and sour and really, that's about all you can hope for when making sweet and sour sauce. My only complaint is that I didn't make my cucumber slice long enough and therefore had much difficulty wrapping it around my pork.

The Stir-Fried Bok Choy was not very good. It was sort of spicy and bitter and bland. Bok choy is a really difficult stand alone vegetable, I find. When thawing chicken in the fridge the even salmonella juices escaped and ran into my vegetable crisper, so I'm at a loss for vegetables right now and likely for the next couple of days. This makes for a difficult stir-fry, unless I'm going to make one of soy sauced apples and bananas.

Beforehand I made Marbled Devilled Eggs. I was reading about marbling eggs using tea a bit ago and had to try it out. It did not work as well as I expected, since most of the marbled pattern ends up on the shells, but you can still see a decorative shading on the outside of the eggs. I can see myself doing this again just for kicks, but it doesn't impart a single bit of flavor on the egg itself. The rest is basically just a devilled egg recipe with sesame seeds and green onions. The sesame seeds really didn't add to it at all, but I thought that they'd look pretty.