You had me at Garam Masala

Garam Masala has quickly become one of my favourite spice blends. One of these days I need to find an Indian Cuisine market store and see if I can get some really good authentic fresh ground blend. It’s so fantastic and fragrant. A lot of the recipes I’ve been drawn to lately have this blend in their ingredients.

We have company for the weekend and a full weekend of family for dinner, and church family for a house blessing and a weekend guest who is like a sister and such a pleasure to have visit and stay with us.

So after shopping and finding that Costco had their amazing pork tenderloins on sale, I decided pork tenderloin and baked squash were on tonite’s dinner menu.

“the Loin King” recipe came from one of my previous Podleski sister cookbooks. I actual used all 3 cookbooks tonite. The butternut squash recipe from the new Yum and Yummer, and then I made Goody Two Chews for breakfast and coffee bites for the weekend from another book.

And, while I was at it, I made the roasted carrot and sweet potato soup for Sundays dinner that was such a success last weekend. (Photo below before blending). It’s now in the garage fridge cooling and blending flavours beautifully. While I was at it I chopped up all the veg needed for another soup recipe I’ll be cooking up tomorrow.

For dinner, first I made the Pork Loin marinade, and let the meat marinate for about 2 hours.. should be 24 hrs or overnight, but I decided too late to make this recipe. The marinade had brown sugar, balsamic, reduced sod. Soy sauce, ginger, EVOO, cumin.. and a few other things I forget. it turned out so moist, fork tender.. incredible.

The Garam Masala came in with the squash..

This recipe was simple.. Garam Masala, melted butter, S&P, maple syrup, and grated orange peel. Cut to about 3/4″ thick, 15 min per side in a 400 degree oven.

Salad on the side, and we had an AMAZING meal.

And a LOT of clean up,cause I was also doing prep for a bunch of other meals as well. I am SO done! Thankfully Guillermo attacked the sink for me.

Ugh..

last but not least as we sat down to dinner I popped the Goody Two Chews for tomorrow in the oven.

As per my usual MO, I rarely stick to a recipe. I used almond butter instead of Peanut, and added in dried coconut smiles, pumpkin seeds and sliced almonds.. I couldn’t get pumpkin pie spice, so I put in a whole bunch of other spices.. cinnamon, ginger, cloves, nutmeg, allspice.. and I doubled the recipe right away, I mean, why not?