June 30 ,2020
Paging through some old recipes I’ve cooked I stumbled up this pork skewers recipe on DadCooksDinner. Let’s try it again.There aren’t a lot of ingredients – I used fewer than Mike Vrobel uses because we cut out the cilantro. While I love it, Carla has the gene that makes cilantro taste like soap.
The pork tenderloins weighed in at almost 2½ pounds – we were going to have leftovers. I cut the pork into 1-inch cubes, more or less. The oil, soy sauce, garlic and coriander were headed for our small food processor to be turned into a brine/marinade.
After whirling the marinade in the food processor for about a minute everything goes in a 1 gallon zip lock bag for a couple of hours. Hmm, we’d need some vegetables. We thought about pineapple – always a hit with pork – but didn’t have any so I settled for a yellow bell pepper and a sweet onion.
While the pork was marinating I cut the vegetables up and skewered them.
The swerers and rack are part of the Weber elevation system. The rack has 3 tiers so you can move things up and down as needed. When I sold my Weber gas grill I kept this for my Mak 2 Star pellet grill.
I started some rice; I am currently addicted to coconut rice. I thoroughly rinse 1 cup of jasmine rice – I think basmati would also work – and put it in the cooker. To that I add 1 can of coconut milk; it has usually separated in the can so I put it in a bowl and whisk to combine. Finally I add 2 Tablespoons of grated unsweetened coconut and½ teaspoon kosher salt. Gently stir to combin and cook.
When the pork was well marinated I skewered them as well.
When I got ready to set up the grilling rack I had a problem. Um, maybe I should have measured first to make sure the Weber rack would fit on the Mak. It’s too long by a few inches so I had to scramble. I looked through my old grilling stuff and found a smaller rack for the skewers. I don’t like cooking my skewers directly on the grill; it’s messy and a bit more prone to burning. With the small rack, I had to adjust the skewers and cook in multiple shifts: one for the vegetables and two for the pork.
The pork cooks in less that 10 minutes; not only do they brown on the outside, the HOT skewers help cook from the inside.
The sweet chili sauce is a great dipping sauce for this dish. The skewers on the plate makes a nice presentation picture but isn’t practical for real life: those things are EXTREMELY HOT. So, I pull them off the rods.
Dinner is served
Rating: ★★★★
It’s extremely easy to prepare – though it does take a bit of knife time. I think pork kabobs are pretty versatile in that you can have plenty of choices for your marinade. Next time I make this I’ll add about 1 inch of shredded ginger. Mike Vrobel of DadCooksDinner.com uses about ¼ cup of oil in some of his “brinerades” – as he calls them. That will help the browning. But heck, if you don’t want to make your own marinade there are plenty of options at the grocery store.
Let’s go back to the skewer system for a bit. I need something that will hold a few skewers but that will fit in my grill which is about 20-inches wide. I found this Steve Raichlen system on Amazon.
The rack can cook 6 skewers at a time and there are more provided so you can have them ready to swap in when your first batch is done. I wondered if I could get two sets and sort of nest them together. Yay! I can. I overlap three of the notches so I get nine cooking slots on my grill.
But, wow!, those skewers are enormous; compare with my Weber rods.
Those skewers seem too big to me; if I use them I’ll need to cook bigger cubes of meat and vegetables. The Weber skewers will still work in the new rack; we’ll see. I haven’t cooked with the new set up yet. I’ll keep you posted.
One last word on skewers, I am not a fan of round rods. After poking through the food, the food has a habit of staying put when you turn the skewer. So you turn the skewer but the food doesn’t move. Not good.
We’ve had a couple of hummingbirds feeding on some of our flowers recently. I sat on the deck waiting to get a picture, but they are camera shy. I did grab a pic of one of our tomato plants – which has been unhappy with the cool cloudy weather we’ve been having this summer.
and a wild garlic plant.
