Sunday Night Dinners

When I think of Sunday night dinners, I think of roasts. Roast beef, roast pork, roast chicken, the animal doesn’t really matter so long as there is an animal and it’s roasted. The typical accompaniments to said roast are potatoes and a veggie. Both of those can take a number of forms. The potatoes can be baked, boiled, mashed or smashed. The veggies can be steamed, fried, cooked or raw. Put it all on the table with a salad and a dessert afterwards and you’ve got Sunday dinner. There’s usually lots of food so it’s perfect for company. Unfortunately, when you don’t live with any family, Sunday night dinners are few and far between. But sometimes you just want homey, comfort food, whether or not you’ve got family there to share it with. And that’s how I ended up cooking an entire pork roast, for one. Can you say leftovers?

My solo Sunday night dinner consisted of a roast of pork, mashed potatoes and glazed carrots. When I was little and we had mashed potatoes I insisted that mine take the form of a potato volcano so that I could fill them with gravy and proceed to dunk anything and everything into it, including my fingers. I suppose not much has changed because I still make potato volcanoes. For the pork I used a Rob Rainford recipe for Pulled Pork Picnic Roast. I have made this recipe before, complete with accompanying Peach Chutney and it’s fantastic. Ideally I would have done the pork roast in the smoker like I have in the past, but wait, the smoker is at the family house. That’s another reason why Sunday night dinners mean family. I no longer have a large enough porch, (or any porch) to accommodate the smoker and it remains at my parent’s home. The picture of the smoker in the snow is from last time I was home which was for Dad’s birthday. When winter takes up a good portion of the year you just have to deal with it. BBQ season is all year round, snow or no snow. I miss the porch dwelling smoker, BBQ and infrared fryer…

Enough bellyaching, I’m really not that hard done by, I had a whole roast to myself, didn’t I? I also made glazed carrots from a recipe we used at school. I liked cutting the carrots into bâton shapes so I decided I’d do it at home too, it makes me feel fancy. Oooh la la, les carottes sont coupés en bâtons! Apparently it also makes me feel French. I was feeling particularly full of myself while cooking this meal so I even made a wine gravy and I thought it was damn good gravy too. I treated myself to a few glasses of wine with my meal, (well it was already open…) and capped the night off with some homemade split level chocolate and vanilla puddings. My craving for Sunday night dinner was satisfied, although next time I need to invite some company over so that I don’t have to immediately start planning what to do with the leftover pork. I’ll tell you about what I did with some of it tomorrow, I was surprisingly happy with the results. For extra fun, I used an ingredient I never have before in tomorrow’s dish. What could it be?

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Pork + Potatoes + Carrots