Well, that was a very interesting weekend.

First, I have a new camera. I’ve needed one for some time. Since I started this blog a month ago, I’ve been borrowing my mother-in-law’s Sony Cybershot, which is a really good camera by the way. But I really needed one of my own.

Because I’m not working right now, I wasn’t able to justify spending the money on something like that. Fortunately, my birthday is coming up at the end of the month, so my parents and my wife pitched in and bought me a beautiful new Canon Powershot digital camera.

It is amazing and I look forward to taking lots of beautiful photos for this blog with it. Here’s one I took yesterday.

The other big news is we have an addition to our family! Those of you who know me know that my wife, Sandi, is a dog nut. If she thought we could get away with it, I’m sure we would have 14 dogs running around here. Instead, we’ve had two – Daisy and Isabel.

Ever since our third dog, a wonderfully sweet racetrack rescue greyhound named Jay-Z, had to be put to sleep last February, it has felt like there’s been a hole in our household. Well, we filled that hole Saturday when we picked up our new puppy, Bud, from the local Anti-Cruelty Society.

Bud

He’s an eight-month-old Rottweiler/Labrador mix. What a wonderful puppy! He’s super loving and outgoing, but quite the chewer. Fortunately, I’m home all day, at least for
awhile.

With all this excitement, there wasn’t a lot of time for cooking this weekend. I finally had a chance to cook Sunday night, when I made Medallions of Pork Tenderloin in a Picatta Sauce over Whole Wheat Vermicelli. Here’s the recipe:

For the Pork Medallions

1/2 lb pork tenderloins, cut into 1-1/2 inch discs

Pan spray

½ cup bread crumbs

S&P to taste

For the Piccatta Sauce

½ cup dry white wine

½ cup chicken stock

¼ cup lemon juice (about one large lemon)

¼ tsp Italian seasoning

½ white onion, small dice

1 large garlic clove, minced

1 TBS whole butter

2 TBS all purpose flour

¼ cup capers

Heat 1 TSP EVOO in sauce pan until smoking. Add onions and sauté until translucent, about five minutes. Add garlic and cook another minute. Add white wine, chicken stock and Italian seasoning, bring to boil then reduce to a medium simmer until liquid is reduced by half, about 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, build a roux by melting butter in small sauce pan then whisking in flour until a mixture the consistency of oatmeal is formed. Reduce heat and stir occasionally until light brown. Remove from heat.

Once the sauce is reduced to half its volume, whisk in some of the roux to thicken the sauce a little and add the capers.

For Assembly

¼ cup chopped parsley

Lemon wedges

Cook vermicelli in boiling water according to package instructions, 5-7 minutes. Drain, toss in EVOO, season with S&P. Mound pasta as high as possible in center of pasta bowl, shingle pork medallions at base of mound and nap with piccata sauce. Garnish with chopped parsley and lemon wedges. Serve additional sauce on side.

You can substitute chicken or veal for the pork. Just make sure to pound it so that you are mashing the muscle fibers flat. Also, you can zest the lemon and add the chopped up zest to the sauce for a little extra citrus flavor.

One more thing: I switched to a self-hosted blog rather than using Word Press to host. Not much should change for users  (other than it can now be found at budgetcookingblog.com), but it should give a lot more flexibility in terms of what I can do with it. Does anybody with blogging experience have any advice as to how to best take advantage of self-hosting? I would really be grateful because I’m really new to the computer stuff.