Sunday Dinner: Pork Roast

This week, Sunday dinner seemed determined to be the Dinner of Disaster. I am one of those cooks who usually sails smoothly through meal preparation without too much drama, so when I hit a few bumps I tend to get a wee bit irritated.

Right off the mark, there was a problem with the Chocolate Peanut Butter Brownies (it's a great recipe from a Fry's Cocoa booklet, I just spent 20 minutes trying to find it on the internet and came up dry!) This is one of our "go to" dessert recipes - easy, fast, tried and true. My hubby and I were working on the batter together, and he was finishing it off and putting it in the oven while I moved on to other things. He asked me what size pan it needed, and I told him 9 x 13 and recommended using the glass pan instead of the metal one. Half an hour later, I pulled the brownies out of the oven when the timer went off and discovered they were in the lasagna dish, which is nowhere close to 9 x13. Yikes!! I put them back in for another 5 minutes as they seemed a lot squishier than brownies should be, and hoped for the best.

Onward...

While the brownies were baking, I had gotten the pork roast (purchased for 99 cents a pound!) ready for the oven, so out came the brownies and in went the roast. Timer set for 45 minutes. I busied myself washing dishes and chopping carrots, and got the carrots started cooking when the roast was about half way done. With 15 minutes to go, I peeked in the oven and discovered that the roast looked, well, not done. At ALL. In fact it looked just like it did when I put it in there. Then I noticed the oven didn't seem that hot. OH CRAP!! The oven was OFF. The pork had been sitting in there for half an hour doing nothing! About then I happened to notice that I hadn't started the rice that was supposed to be on the side either, so I guess it's a good thing the roast wasn't cooked after all.

I got the oven heated up and the roast cooking and the rice and carrots simmering, took a deep breath, poured a glass of wine and got to work on the orange glaze for the roast - thankfully this at least went off without a hitch!

In the end, it all worked out. Everything was properly cooked, hot and ready to go at the same time. But by the time I got it all plated out, I didn't have the wherewithall to snap a pic!

Final menu:

Pork roast with orange glaze
Carrots and green beans
Rice

White wine

Chocolate Peanut Butter Brownies

(Oh, and as it turns out, we actually like the brownies better in the smaller pan - they're thicker and more satisfying. Sometimes what looks like a disaster ends up being a gift!)