Blog

This past weekend featured the first and second rounds of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, otherwise known as March Madness and pretty much the best weekend of the year (every year) for college basketball fans and wanna be bookies. As I was going to have hours and hours of time on my hands, Robin and I intended to smoke a corned beef brisket, but we didn’t come up with the idea until Saturday morning and there were no corned beef briskets to be had. So on to Plan B, pork tenderloin, which in all honesty is a damn good Plan B.

For a barbecue guy like myself (okay, maybe a wanna be barbecue guy), smoking pork tenderloin kind of feels like cheating. It only takes two hours, compared to eight or nine for the pork butts and briskets that I smoke, and you end up with delicious and tender smoked pork. Again, doesn’t seem quite right but I’ll get over it.

This ‘stressful weekend in Ivins’ actually included a fair amount of stress, in that I entered four different tournament pools and it looks like I have a shot to win some decent cash in at least one of them. Go Gonzaga! Although planting my butt on the couch, monitoring the smoker and watching all or parts of 48 basketball games in four days may not actually count as stressful. It’s a dirty job, and well, somebody’s got to do it.

The pork tenderloin turned out amazing, very juicy and tender. We had coleslaw and potato salad with it and everything was delicious. On Sunday we made Cuban sandwiches with the remaining tenderloin, along with ham, Swiss cheese, pickles and mustard. I had never made them before but they were YUMMO!