I’m late.  Again.  In more ways than you know.  Ha!  Ok, enough about my meno.  When I’m not sweating, I’m freezing.  I’m over it.  I’m over so many things.  Like dishes.  I think every single parent knows the perils of cooking at home when it comes to dishes.  It’s like, you work all day at some thankless crappy job to come home and do more thankless jobs….cooking and cleaning.

Then your kid/s have the nerve to complain about dinner.  Seriously?  Eat the food Tina!  Lucky for me, I was a bit late to the Let’s Have A Kid game show.  Shocking, I know.  I had the opportunity to watch my friends have kids and then watch my friends hilariously navigate the picky eater obstacle course.  Which isn’t funny when you’re in it.

I decided to steer my kid away from indulging in pickiness about food.  It saved my sanity many, many times.  And I managed to eliminate a host of food issues from our lives that I saw other parents struggle with daily.  I made the decision early on to make my life as a single parent as easy possible.  And growing up, I ate what was put in front of me.  Because there was nothing else.  And I was hungry.  My kid never knew what it was to be hungry.  I made sure of that.

How’d I do it?  I simply did not allow my child to not eat what I cooked.  Period.  There were no other options except one.  Canned spinach.  Breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  Don’t like what I made?  Eat canned spinach.  Worked like a charm.  My kid tried to play chicken (pun intended) with me one time.  Just once!  Hunger took over and he ate the meal I cooked…two days later.  I won’t not throw away perfectly good food.  And that was the end of that.

Where was I?  Oh right….dishes and single parenting.  Sigh.  Today, I whip out paper plates when I’m sick of washing dishes.  As a single mom, five bucks for paper plates was not a thing.  I washed everything.  I know, I know…make the kids wash ’em!  Right.  Maybe if you can afford to replace dishes once a week or like eating off of greasy plates maybe.  Or if you love nagging at the end of very long work days.  Not me.  It was just easier to do them myself.  Still is, to be honest.  Plus, homework.  Blah.

Focus!  I became the master of the one skillet, one pot, one sheet pan/casserole type dinners.  Gramma used to make this kielbasa potato thing I loved, probably because it was soaked in fat.  It rendered out of the smoked sausage and soaked into the potatoes.  It was fantastic and one of my favorite ways to eat potatoes.

I’ve made this dish my whole life and it has evolved with me over the course of decades as my life changed.  It started the way she made it, with added oil in a skillet.  I stopped adding oil.  For awhile, I was adding garlic and sometimes I added onions.  Then I started baking it so I could stop standing at the stove monitoring the skillet.  Hubs and I have thrown it onto the griddle out in the garden.  He loved this stupidly simple dish the second I introduced it to him.  Gramma would have loved him.

Most recently, Elizabeth (as you all know) wrapped it in bacon and added cabbage to the mix.  I discovered that I love cabbage with it!  Gramma would have loved her, too.  They could have been sewing buddies.  I riffed off Elizabeth and made it as a sheet pan dinner last night complete with the cabbage.  It was perfect!  The whole thing took fifteen minutes to put together and it cooked for about half an hour~ish.  I actually wished I’d had more cabbage.

The ingredients list is short.  I’m cheap, so I wait until the sausage goes on sale.  Hey, I save a buck!  Cabbage, potatoes, and peppers are also inexpensive.  Sometimes the little picnic sweet peppers are cheaper than the large bell peppers, so I use those.  One day, I’d like to try it with jalapenos or something.  One sausage, one bell pepper, and three or four potatoes easily feeds two people. If you fry it in the skillet, use russets.  If you bake it, use red potatoes.  I’d like to try it with hashbrowns another time.

Anyway, the whole thing costs under ten bucks and sometimes half of that.  You can’t beat it as a single parent.  If you do it sheet pan style you’ll have less dishes.  A lot less.  That works for me!  Much love, from a woman who survived single parenthood mostly intact.  I was lucky, though.  I came from a very long line of single mothers.  Some of us did great!  Others of us….not so much.  I gave it my all.  And that was all I could do.  In between bites of gramma’s kielbasa, of course.

Fewer things bring more joy than a perfectly cooked pork roast.  It should be juicy and have crispy browned textures all at the same time.  I love doing this roast with pork belly, but a whole pork loin is hard to pass up.  Sure, it’s a humble cut, but I like to dress it up.  It’s a bit of work, but if you give yourself plenty of time it won’t be stressful.

You could be lazy and just cut the loin on one side down the middle and stuff it like that and be done with it.  I prefer to butterfly it out and then roll it up.  It’s a lovely presentation with the stuffing swirled in the middle.  And it flavors the meat more thoroughly.  I’ve done it a myriad of ways….most recently was with a cherry bread crumb stuffing for Amanda’s French themed birthday party.

This time, I did a fennel, garlic, apple, and rosemary combination.  I jammed that junk into the food processor and then I sauteed it in some butter and slathered it all over my butterflied pork loin.  I wrapped it in bacon, tied it, and brushed it with maple syrup….not to be confused with maple flavored corn syrup.  Please don’t use that stuff.  Gagomatic.

I rather liked it.  Even though traditional Americana type food is my least favorite (but still above Indian food) I think I’d make it again.  That’s the cool thing about  a pork loin…it’s a blank canvas.  And it’s reasonably priced to feed a crowd.  If you’re not feeding a crowd, you can cut that sucker up into three family of four meals and do it three different ways…stuffed, chops, or a simple roast and the flavor combinations are endless.