Herbed Pork Loin

This past spring, we planted a ton of herbs, peppers and tomatoes in hopes that we’d have a wonderful selection of fresh yummies to include in our recipes, particularly because we love experimenting with different herbs. We didn’t count on the hottest and driest summer we’ve ever known, and we ended up losing a lot of things. (For example: the only creature that ate any of our tomatoes was our mockingbird, and that was simply because it didn’t care that they were dried out and shriveled on the vine. I seriously could not give them enough water to make it.) Thankfully, our rosemary, basil, thyme, and jalapenos survived, and we’ve been using them all summer in different recipes. (The thyme finally died at the beginning of August… it just couldn’t take the heat anymore.) Because we’ve been under a fairly strict burn ban, we decided to try out some new inside recipes for things that we normally grill. This brings us to a pork loin. It’s one of our favorite meats, and we really haven’t found a way to cook it that isn’t yummy. This particular recipe is quite easy, too, which is a definite bonus!

Ingredients

  1. 1 pork loin
  2. olive oil
  3. fresh basil (7-8 leaves of a decent size)
  4. 2-3 sprigs of fresh rosemary, leaves removed from the stems
  5. 3-4 cloves of garlic
  6. 1/2 cup of your favorite white wine
  7. a covered baking dish

Directions

  1. Pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees.
  2. Chop the basil, rosemary and garlic together so that the pieces are quite small and nicely mixed together. Put them in a small bowl.
  3. Add the olive oil to the herbs and stir to make a nice paste (actually, we left ours a bit runnier than a paste that holds its form… you just add olive oil until you reach a consistency you like).
  4. Rub the mixture all over the pork loin (if you have to trim the pork loin and it ends up opening up a bit, go ahead and rub the mixture on the inside part then roll the loin up and set it in the pan in such a way that it will hold itself together).
  5. Place the pork loin in the baking dish and pour the white wine over it.
  6. Cover the dish and bake in the oven for about an hour and a half. You want your meat thermometer to read 160 degrees when inserted in the middle of the thickest part of the meat.

We also like to use this rosemary, garlic, basil, olive oil mix on salmon and chicken. You can bake it in the oven or throw it on the grill. Sometimes we add bread crumbs to the mixture and make a more solid paste then stuff it inside trout and grill it. We’ve yet to find a recipe with these herbs that isn’t divinely delicious!