A Quest for Fantastic

Growing up, I always dreaded pork roast dinners. To me, there was nothing exciting or enticing or interesting about a pork roast. While my sister happily gobbled up her helping of pork (eaten in true Mandi-style with a side of applesauce), I was left wishing that it were taco night or chicken stir-fry night or even meatloaf night. Anything but pork.

Maybe I should have guessed that if pork were combined with something more exotic that I would feel a little differently about "the other white meat." Well, if this revelation hadn't come to me before last night, it sure did sink in after cooking up a double-batch of Fantastic Pork Fajitas. Really. That was the name of the recipe. I mean, how can you go wrong with a recipe that has such unabashed confidence in itself? Its self-assurance alone is enough to convince you that the recipe is bound to succeed. And succeed it did.

After several weeks of "duds," I was ready for something that left me with both a full tummy and a feeling of accomplishment. The Fantastic Pork Fajitas delivered on their promise! The peppers smelled and tasted fabulous. The pork remained pretty tender in spite of my fear that I was over-cooking it. The pure idea of fajitas was fun enough to give dinner a light-hearted feel. And, the flavor was exotic enough to make even pork exciting.

I do have to admit that I took the liberty of making a couple of minor changes. I fried up the peppers in their own pan, mostly because we doubled the recipe and none of my pans would hold that much pork plus two chopped-up peppers. This worked to our advantage, however, because the peppers got nice and browned...which might not have happened if they had been cooked along with the pork (which produced a lot of liquid in the cooking process). Also, I substituted red peppers for the green peppers, simply because I think that they are a highly superior pepper. Green peppers annoy my taste buds. Oh, and I left out the onions, partly because I didn't want an onion-scented apartment for the rest of the night, partly because onions are not my most favorite food, but mostly because I was hungry and tired of chopping. The fajitas may have been even more fantastic with the addition of onions, but we were satisfied without them. We had plenty of fantastic to make us more than content. Of course, after the White Bean Dip and Chicken Jerk debacles of the past few weeks, this may not have been too hard to achieve.