First Try at the Crock-Pot

This weekend I had the opportunity to go home and cook for my mom and boyfriend. I thought that this would be the perfect time to try my first Crock-Pot recipe, for an audience too! I spend the days leading up to Friday searching on Pinterest for a few recipes that I could give them the choice of. They both ended up deciding on a brown sugar balsamic glazed pork tenderloin.  I found the recipe on Pinterest, and let my mom know what ingredients I needed (saving $$ already!). The ingredients were pretty simple.
- salt
- pepper
- sage
- garlic
- water
- brown sugar
- corn starch
- balsamic vinegar
- soy sauce.

All my ingredients ready to go.

After my class on Friday, I made the trek home for the weekend to begin my cooking. Right away I saw an issue. The recipes calls for you to cook the pork tenderloin on low for 6-8 hours. The issue was that by the time I got home it was almost 2. I was did not want to wait until at least 8pm to eat. From there I decided to take a risk and look up some crockpot timing changes. Recipe Tips gave me a great conversion chart, where I found that I could change the timing from 6-8 hours on low to 3-4 hours on high. Hooray, less time before we can eat!

 The beginning of the recipe calls for you to mix all the dry and rub it on the pork tenderloin. From there you put 1/2 a cup of water in the Crock-Pot and add the pork tenderloin.  From there I had to let it cook for the next 2 hours before I could start & add the glaze.  The waiting begins...

 FINALLY, the two hours was up and I could start making the glaze. Surprisingly it was a lot easier than I thought. At this point I felt like the pork was cooking too quickly, so as I put the glaze on I turned the Crock-Pot back down to low, and let it cook for another 1.5 hours.  At this point I also realized that you can't just serve pork as a meal (DUH). So I last minute decided on rice as a side.

By 5:30pm, our dinner was finally ready! I was actually really nervous to have my mom and boyfriend taste it.

Overall, I got approval from everyone! The pork ended up being really good, and the glaze was addicting. It may have been a little more dry than I would have preferred, but not bad for my first try! I think my first try showed me how easy a recipe like this could be, and how it can actually save me time. As the pork was cooking I was able to do some cleaning, as well as work for my classes. This will be ideal over the semester, as I know I will have a lot of work. I can throw my meals in the crockpot and continue to do homework while my food cooks.

The finished product!

Stayed tuned next week as I take on Rootbeer Crock-Pot pulled pork!