RECIPE - Easy Weeknight Porchetta

For most of us getting back to the daily grind of work and reality after the holidays, it's been rough. If you're located on the East Coast or pretty much anywhere that's not Southern California (not bitter or anything), the freezing cold weather certainly doesn't help. For me, what I always crave in the dead of winter, in that soulless terrible period of cold between January and April(ish), is a huge, massive hunk of roasted meat. Vegetarians, look away now. 

Luckily, Bon Appetit magazine - as they always do - came to the rescue with this recipe for an easy weeknight porchetta. Normally, porchetta is a fairly complex and long-winded dish that takes a long time to make, involving big cuts of pork shoulder, a lot of tying, rolling and roasting time, all culminating in a deliciously moist cut of meat that's incredibly flavored and moist. 

With this condensed version of the dish, which I adapted slightly from what BA suggests, we rely on bacon (REJOICE) to help keep the pork moist as it's roasting and a ton of fresh herbs to help cut through the heaviness of all that protein. 

Ingredients
4 garlic cloves, plus 2 heads, halved crosswise (this means horizontally, not through the base)
2 sprigs of fresh rosemary, plus 4 sprigs, separated
1 tablespoon fennel seeds
1½ teaspoons kosher salt
2 tablespoons olive oil, divided
Freshly ground black pepper
1 1½-lb. pork tenderloin
6 slices of thick-cut bacon (original recipe says 4 slices but you want enough to cover the whole loin)

The beast you'll be creating before it hits the oven.

Procedure

• Preheat oven to 425°. Remove rosemary leaves from your first two sprigs and throw them into a food processor, along with the 4 garlic cloves, fennel seeds, salt and a glug of EVOO. Whizz until ou have a paste. 
  
• Get ready with your (clean!) hands and rub the herby mixture all over tenderloin (if you have time to do this in the morning or even overnight, that's ideal. We didn't.) 
• Scatter rosemary sprigs in a large baking dish and set the pork tenderloin on top, per the image above. Wrap bacon slices around tenderloin, tucking ends underneath so the tenderloin is firmly wrapped with bacon goodness and so the ends don't burn. Nestle your halved heads of garlic around the meat and drizzle all of it with more EVOO.
  
• Roast until an instant-read thermometer inserted into thickest part of tenderloin registers 145° for medium. This is going to depend on how big your cut of tenderloin is but for my version it took about 50 to 55 minutes. Yours will likely take 45 minutes but start keeping a close eye on that thermometer towards the end  because no one - no one - likes dry pork. 
• Once out of the oven, let the tenderloin rest for at least 10 minutes before carving. This is super important because you don't want all the juicy goodness inside the tenderloin to run all over the board once you slice into it. 

And there you have it - a hearty, flavorful crowd-pleaser of a meal. We served ours with some sauteed veg and couscous but no judgement at all if you want to just straight up tear into some slices on the cutting board. Also, leftovers would be awesome in a sandwich #justsayin.