New recipes from this week

Asian-Brined Pork Loin from Food and Wine Magazine. There were good ideas here, but also a few significant shortcomings. One, I have no idea how to carve a pork roast, so now I have a bunch of ragged looking slices of meat, and am gnawing much meat off of bones rather than trying to cut around them. Two, I am the only meat eater in the house, so a five pound hunk of pork is a little daunting when I realize I have to eat the whole thing. Three, I probably should've trimmed down some of the fat, so that the tasty outsides, seasoned up with the brine, were attached to meat rather than to the fat that I didn't eat.

Ultimately, it isn't that bad. The meat is versatile -- I mixed a little in with mac and cheese, I've made banh mi and fried rice, I've frozen a few pounds worth of pork, and I have plans for stir fries for the rest.

Orange Berry Muffins from Dorie Greenspan's Baking cookbook. This was a simple recipe, no giant mixer needed. I didn't have buttermilk, but I substituted some lowfat milk and some greek yogurt, and I used clementines instead of an orange for the juice and zest. This recipe included the novel step of zesting the citrus and rubbing the zest together with the sugar, to make citrus-scented/flavored sugar as part of the base. As usual, there was some magic and poof, muffins. These are probably worth making again, for their simplicity, texture, and ease of recipe.