Christmas Dinner!

Colossal triumphs and failures
I am the type of cook that can pull of a 4 course meal for 6 and have everything come out on time. At the same time I can also fail miserably at making the simplest meals like grilled cheese.
My very first ‘family’ meal was for an early Christmas last year. I actually had a huge triumph and a huge failure in the same meal.

The huge (and surprising) triumph:
Stuffed pork with an apple walnut stuffing (I know it sounds really fancy but it wasn’t too hard at all).
I started with a pork loin (not tenderloin, the whole thing) and butterflied it. To butterfly a pork loin you start with a piece of meat that looks a little like a log and slice about ¾ of an inch down and start cutting on and angle. You should end up with a piece of meat that is about ¾ of an inch thick all the way around. Once I butterfly meat I marinate, I do this after cutting it so that the marinade can get down into the deeper recesses of the meat. For this application I marinated the pork in apple cider, cumin, allspice, nutmeg, and salt. I left this for a few hours.
While that marinated I started the stuffing. I used a boxed cornbread stuffing and mixed in some apple cider, melted butter, chopped granny smith apples, crushed walnuts and the same mix of spices I used in the marinade. This should be a more moist than you would normally make, it makes it much easier to spread inside the pork.
Now to stuff. I laid the pork out on a cutting board and slather on the stuffing. I left about ¾ of an inch at the outside and of the meat. This is so the stuffing doesn’t squish out the end of the roll. Then starting from the opposite end of the pork I rolled the pork in to jellyroll shape and tied it with butcher’s twine to hold it in place while it cooked. I roasted the pork with sweet potatoes, and onions. It was fantastic. I won’t lie I was shocked.

Awful failure: The extra crispy extra stuffing
I tried to crisp up the extra stuffing to serve alongside the pork and the potatoes. While I was spinning around working on getting the meat and potatoes to the table I forgot about the stuffing. I only remembered about half way through the meal and it was toast by that point.

Lesson learned: Don’t forget when you put something in the over. Actually set a timer so you have something beeping at you before it gets too crispy.