RTFM - In The Kitchen

There are times when you should truly take the advice as provided in the title. "Read The Fine Manual". Well, in this case, it was a recipe. I had to have read this thing 3 or 4 times before I started cooking. Each and every time I read the instructions, I came to the same conclusion. It wasn't until it was WAY too late did I realize my mistake. Thankfully, I didn't ruin dinner into the trash can. I got lucky this time.

For this episode in the kitchen, I was attempting to make Island Pork Tenderloin. I thought I had everything covered, until the first set of instructions were improperly completed. After getting the dry rub mixed up and applied to the tenderloin, the instructions said to "brown, 4 minutes".

Well, I managed to mistake the meaning of this entry. I dropped the tenderloin into the skillet and set it down for 4 minutes on EACH side. It was only until later that I realized it was to brown each side and this should only take 4 minutes. Anyway, part of the confusion that I ran into was that this tenderloin was roughly in the shape of a square or cylinder. I only later realized that there were 2 pieces of tenderloin that were frozen together. The defrost cycle didn't do as well of a job this time around and they were pretty convincingly tied together. Therefore, after the 16 minute "browning" time I had put forth did I realize that 4 minutes was total, not per side.

Well, after this is all said & done, I come to pray that the remaining step of baking a marinade into the tenderloin would render it as edible. This time I was lucky and it was moist and delicious.

One of these days I'm going to ruin an entire meal. I dread that day.