Saturday Night Fever

Planning of Saturday dinners usually goes something like this.

Mise en scène: Saturday morning, Spouse and self reading the weekend papers at the kitchen table, drinking coffee.

Me: What should we cook tonight?

Spouse: Mmm.

Me (flipping through 'lifestyle' section): Nothing interesting in here. What do you feel like?

Spouse: Mmm.

Me: Ok - beef, chicken, seafood, vegetarian? European, Asian or other? Hearty or light?

Spouse: Beef, not Asian.

Me: I don't want beef.

You get the drift.

This week, however, I managed to bypass all of that. I found this recipe a week or so ago that I wanted to try.

Stuffed pork fillet with grilled eggplant (filetto di maiale ripieno con melanzane alla griglia) - from delicious magazine May 2010

2 large eggplant, sliced into 1cm rounds
100g pork mince
100g chestnuts, cooked, peeled etc
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 tbsp fennel seeds, toasted & ground
1/2 cup sultanas
2 x 500g pork fillets
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp thyme leaves

Dressing
2 tsp wholegrain mustard
1 tsp each honey & caster sugar
2 tbsp white wine vinegar
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
1 tsp finely chopped chives

Salt & drain eggplant for 1 hour, then rinse and pat dry.

While eggplant is draining, put mince, chestnuts, garlic and fennel seeds in a processor and whizz. Add sultanas and season.

Slice fillets lengthwise but not the whole way through (see below). Stuff, roll up and fasten with kitchen string.

Heat oven to 180C.

Brown pork in 1 tbsp olive oil in ovenproof pan on medium-high then transfer to oven for 15 minutes. Cover with foil and rest.

While pork is in oven, cook eggplant on chargrill (or grill pan), then toss with thyme and a little olive oil.

Divide eggplant between plates. Mix dressing. Slice pork in thick slices on an angle and arrange on eggplant, then drizzle dressing over and serve.

Notes: Recipe above has ingredients exactly as per original. I love eggplant, but even I don't want half a large eggplant as part of this dish, so I cut back. I am also WAY too lazy to do the full salt and drain thing with the eggplant - as far as I know, this was designed to reduce bitterness in old varieties of eggplant, that has since been largely bred out. Our pork fillets were definitely not 500g each either. And last but not least, I used my favourite technique for stuffing a fillet (can't remember where I got it from). Here it is: Working on the premise that your fillet is a circle in cross section, cut straight down to halfway. From this point, cut to the left and right about halfway each.


This gives a good 'spread' for putting your stuffing in and makes tying it up much easier. Ok, yup, I realise I may be getting a bit obsessive. I'll back off now.

And I left out the sultanas. The dish does need the tang of the dressing though, definitely.

The verdict after all that? Pretty tasty (if not pretty!).


I thought about a pannacotta for dessert, but was so occupied with the lawn in the morning that I ran out of setting time. Rice pudding had to suffice.