Barbecue Pork Tacos

I would post pictures of a taco, but I eated it. Anyway…

Had a craving for barbecue, but my grill and my pantry of lovely spice delights are still in storage. So what’s in the fridge?

  • 2 medium slices of cooked pork tenderloin with a sage/herb rub that I had picked up at the hot counter at the grocery store the other day, but didn’t use yet.
  • hand-made 6″ flour tortillas from the Mexican Grocery at Pike’s Place Market
  • red onion, tomato & lettuce
  • monterey jack cheese
  • sour cream

I logged into my Cook’s Illustrated account and searched for their testing of bottled barbecue sauce. I’ll spill the beans and share with you that the taste testers chose Bullseye Original, which was surprisingly one of the least expensive on the shelf. I specifically wanted a sweeter sauce, and this was a good combination of sweet, smoke & spices.

Thank You Cook’s!

Again, I know it’s blasphemy for me to be using a mass-produced bottled sauce, but Cook’s picked a pretty tasty one. It does the trick in a pinch quite well. AND it doesn’t have any high-fructose corn syrup. AND I’m short on time today. AND the price is right!

So the slices of tenderloin looked like this:

Someone else’s pork tenderloin. Because I ate mine already.

They were about 3/4 of an inch thick. So I laid each piece flat on the cutting board, and cut strips somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2 inches wide. I placed them in a sauce pan with about 1/2 the bottle of sauce, and enough water to make it all swim and stir a little better, probably 1/2 cup. Put a lid on it, turned the heat to low, and stirred every so often until I was ready to use it.

Next, I diced my tomatoes, thinly sliced the onion and lettuce, and shredded the cheese. This was not uninterrupted work, by the way. I had to go to my car to grab some stuff I forgot to bring in, unloaded some other groceries, tried to clean an impossibly burnt pan that I’ve been soaking for 2 days…

So in the end, the pork probably gently simmered for a good half hour. I was looking for the sauce to re-thicken, and for the pork to be super tender.

Here is where I took a wrong turn. I originally said tacos here, right? So I took the pot of pork off the heat, and set the tortillas in the microwave to warm. I realized that I would prefer the cheese to be melted. So rather than just assembling tacos, I went into quesadilla mode. Probably should have stuck with tacos. But this still would have been workable.

I heated olive oil in a skillet to about medium-high, until it was shimmering. Took 2 tortillas. Loaded 1/2 of each with one layer of cheese, one layer of pork & sauce, and then a final layer of cheese. I folded each in half, placed them in the pan and covered.

When one side was brown, I did the flip to brown the other side, then slid them on a cutting board, and did a second pair. This is where I should have stopped.

Again, not mine. But that’s how they kinda looked.

But no, I have this obsession with cutting things into appetizer size. I usually like the results, but with sloppy, saucy pork, and having still the tomatoes, onions & lettuce to stuff in after the fact, I should have left them as half circles. Nope, I cut each one into 3 triangles, about 2 1/2″ long & 2″ wide. Neato finger food snack size.

This is how mine would have looked without sloppy barbecue pork in them. All delicate and pretty and easy to pick up at a party and not spill on your dress.

Sadly, they ended up being quite a bit of work to eat. Delicious all the same, but more work than one would usually like to take on during a relaxing dinner. //sigh//

Delicious, and I’ll definitely do this again! Next time, I’ll likely stick with taco style. But if I absolutely need the toasted outside and melty cheese, I’ll forego the fancy cutting.

xo
en

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