Gingery-Dijon Pork Roast with Roasted Potatoes, Green Beans and Piroshky

I've not given up on this blog, but I have been very much not in the mood for it lately. Not even the blog, just the food, I suppose. Maybe it's the winter doldrums, but I do tend to latch onto comfort foods and easy, lazy junk foods around this time of year, and it's been worse with my grandfather having been sick and then dying because it's made me not want to care about anything else. Make a decent dinner or mope and eat a row oreos for dinner? The oreos would win out.

There have been a few meals that I haven't posted in the meantime. Besides the old standards that aren't worth a photograph (or have already been photographed.) My sister and I made roast chicken last week, with mashed potatoes, stuffing and salad. But I've posted that meal before, so no sense in posting it again.

And a while back I made this really gorgeous rice pilaf-ish thing. Well, not a pilaf, but I don't really know what to call it. It was a flavoured rice that's meant to be served with something else, but... I didn't feel up to making anything else, so I wound up freezing the rice. Tomorrow I'm going to try making a kind of faux-Indian, faux-fried rice with some of the leftovers.

At any rate, we've been making proper Sunday dinners around here the last couple weeks. Last week was the chicken, this week was a pork leg roast we got from my aunt and uncle. (A pig of which we could find out the provenance, even. It's not often I get meat like that, since generally I can't afford the good stuff where you can find out.) The reason for the Sunday dinners is that we're working on emptying the freezer. There's quite a lot of roasts and hams and probably another chicken in there. We could almost eat a roast a day for half a month, I'm sure. (The aforementioned aunt and uncle give us a lot of meat. Every time we see them, they send a small cooler of meat back home with us. Sometimes it's from deer they've hunted, sometimes pork.)

I've never cooked a pork roast before - or a roast of any sort, actually - so I went looking for a website that's slapped on the labels of a lot of pork packages around here - putporkonyourfork.com. I found a recipe for a pork roast that I was able to adapt to the bone-in roast we had. They call it Sensational Pork Roast, but I call it Gingery-Dijon Roast because those were the two predominant flavours. I think I used a fair bit more ginger than it called for, but it tasted amazing.

The roasted potato recipe was one I found from Giada de Laurentiis, but I found it a bit more greasy than I really care for. (I drained off a lot of oil, and then blotted the potatoes with paper towel to get rid of some more.) They did taste very nice, though, once I'd got rid of some of the excess oil and they'd cooled off enough to eat.

The piroshky are leftover from Christmas - my mom made them and left a bunch in the freezer for us. Still tasty, though we pulled out the sauerkraut filled ones, which I don't care for quite as much as the beef/cabbage ones. The green beans were also from the freezer. I'm not so found of them, though, since they just don't cook up as nicely as fresh. They tasted good, but it's a texture thing.