1 Cup Awesome | A Journey of Discovering Awesome Food

Spice Rubbed Pork Loin

Dave and Sarah Eickelberg — July 18, 2012 — 1 Comment

[This is Part 5 in our Catering series. To view previous posts, click here.]

The final component of the party menu is Spice Rubbed Pork Loin. This pork is where it’s at! It’s juicy, tender and spicy. The combination of cumin and paprika gives it a warm smokey flavor without being too hot. If you prefer a little more kick, just up the amount of crushed red pepper you add to the rub. For the party, we roasted the pork loins and put them into a roaster on the lowest setting just to keep the meat warm. We wanted to keep the heat nice and low so the meat didn’t continue to cook. We found a great roasted salsa verde at Costco that went beautifully with the sliced pork, saving us time and money! This shaved a good (valuable) hour off our prep time. But, really, any salsa verde would work great.

(photo courtesy of The Wedding Format)

In Meat and Poultry, Recipes

[This is Part 4 in our Catering series. To view previous posts, click here.]

Sorry it’s taken us so long (too long!) to get the rest of this series posted. We have said it before, but our lives are a little jam packed! The kiddos have been in full action these days! Over the last month we’ve had vacation bible school, T-Ball, playdates, birthday parties, and Father’s day festivities. Not to mention the usual time we like to carve out for friends, church and TV! Yes…we protect our TV time. Our current TV addiction is Breaking Bad. We are hooked.

Anyways, on to the food..peppers. Quinoa stuffed poblano peppers to be exact. We started with fresh, off the truck poblano peppers from a local Mexican grocery store. Dave had to wait until the very last minute to get these babies. The truck didn’t get there with the peppers until the morning of the party, so he was waiting at the front door when the store opened at 10:00 AM. Cutting it close! Once all 60 peppers were cleaned and halved we filled them with a warm quinoa salad. We’ve posted a very similar version of this before…it’s one of our favorite ways to use quinoa. It was extra awesome and satisfying when it was stuffed into the peppers, roasted, and drizzled with salsa verde.

(photo courtesy of The Wedding Format)

Mexican Chopped Salad with Cilantro Lime Vinaigrette

Dave and Sarah Eickelberg — May 22, 2012 — 3 Comments

[This is Part 3 in our Catering series. To view previous posts, click here.]

Last Fall, I (Dave) went to a conference for work at Disneyland Hotel (rough…I know). The food that the hotel served was so incredibly good. It was better than any catered food I had ever had before. One of the meals they served was a Mexican-style meal, and it helped to inspire the food we served for the party. They served a salad with jicama in it, and that was my first time ever eating jicama. If you have not had it before, it is a cool and crunchy root vegetable with a mild taste. We added some jicama to the salad we served and it was the mystery ingredient of the night. We had about 10 people ask us what the “crunchy white stuff” was in the salad.

The jicama, along with the other ingredients, made for a pretty amazing salad! It was crisp with bright and fresh flavors and was the perfect salad for a Mexican-style meal.

(photo courtesy of The Wedding Format)

In Recipes, Salad

St. Patrick’s Day – Reuben Hash and Shandy

Dave and Sarah Eickelberg — March 14, 2011 — 8 Comments

St. Patrick’s Day is nearly upon us! You could celebrate the day by eating a bowl of Lucky Charms for breakfast and then going to your local pub in the afternoon. But if that doesn’t sound appealing, you could make an amazing Irish meal to enjoy with your friends or family.

Every year around St. Patricks day, we have two Irish meals. The first meal, which we eat with Sarah’s family, is the traditional corned beef and cabbage. We will share pictures of this meal on St. Patrick’s Day. The other is a Rachael Ray recipe we found a couple years ago. It takes the basic components of a St. Patrick’s Day meal and combines all of them together in one pan. The original recipe can be found here.

Of course, a St. Patrick’s Day meal would not be complete without a tall glass of beer. If you are a Guinness fan, more power to you. Neither of us a enjoy Guinness, so we went with a Shandy. It is the perfect compliment to this incredible meal.

In Meat and Poultry, Recipes

Archives For extra virgin olive oil

Spice Rubbed Pork Loin

Quinoa Stuffed Poblano Peppers

Mexican Chopped Salad with Cilantro Lime Vinaigrette

St. Patrick’s Day – Reuben Hash and Shandy

Search For Awesomeness