Kitchen Sink

A couple of chefs have coined this phrase already but I think it is the perfect term for many dishes.  A kitchen sink dish is a recipe where you "add everything but the kitchen sink" - it doesn't really matter what you add to the skillet/casserole dish/pot - you're gonna get a good hearty meal.

Tonight I made kitchen sink pork tenderloin for several reasons.  I really didn't want to fuss with a complicated recipe, I had a lot of extra veggies kicking around, and let's face it - adding pork tenderloin to anything is gonna be delicious.  Kitchen sink meals are just a great way to use up food instead of throwing it away because you don't have an "official" recipe.

I haven't used couscous in a while, so I put on a cup of that and threw a small red onion in a wok with a few cloves of minced garlic (using my new microplane grater which I pretty much can't live without).  I sliced up the pork into large bite-sized pieces and then added:
- a cup of halved cherry tomatoes
- a cup of frozen peas
- 1/2 cup of this marinade

Once the pork was cooked, I had myself a meal.  This honestly took me 20 minutes, which is perfect for a Tuesday night.  Kitchen sink meals are incredibly versatile.  As I was making this dish, I thought to myself "man I wish I had some chinese cabbage and mushroom to add to this" - in which case I would have used the oyster sauce in my fridge instead of the marinade.  I could have also made this a vegetarian meal by adding a can of chickpeas and a can of beans instead of meat.

Anyways hopefully this post will remind me to keep experimenting with new flavours and ingredients.  More kitchen sink recipes to come, I hope!