From Philadelphia to Brooklyn...

Well....the FOUR DEGREE night totally kicked our Philadelphia plans to the curb;)  Because reaching into my freezer was about as cold as I wanted to get yesterday!  But thankfully, we had a pretty good back up to "Capital Grill":  A pork braciola that we had frozen from our trip to the pork store in Brooklyn!

A braciola is a piece of steak or pork flattened and filled with cheese & spices.  Sweet, right??

To cook it up, I browned each side of the braciola in a dutch oven coated with a couple tablespoons of olive oil.  When the final side of the braciola was browning, I tossed in a couple cloves of garlic to let those toast up for a few minutes.  Next, I threw in a cup of white wine and brought that to a boil.... 

Meanwhile, I broke out the big guns....2 cans of San Marzano tomatoes:) .... aka:  The best canned tomoatoes ever!

I mixed the tomatoes along with some salt, pepper, a tablespoon of sugar & a small can of tomato paste and poured that over the pork.... 

I popped the entire pan, covered in foil, in the oven set at 350.  I let it cook for an hour and a half, turned the braciola every half hour, and removing the foil for the last 30 minutes of cooking....

When the pork still had an hour left to bake, I worked on our side dish:  Teeny Tiny potatoes (from Trader Joe's:) ... 

I mixed the potatoes with olive oil, crushed garlic & a few springs of rosemary....which, I think, I got an entire rosemary TREE in this pack...:) 

You let those roast for an hour, along with the pork, and you are good to go!

To say the pork was great is an understatement:)  The provolone and spices just reallllly kicked this bad bear up a notch...or a thousand notches:) 

...and topped with the fresh gravy made it out of this world:) 

The potatoes were crunchy on the outside, buttery on the inside and exploded with flavor from the garlic & rosemary:)

And we rounded out dinner with more herb salad (with raspberry vinaigrette).  Can't get enough of this salad! :) 

And best of all...you end up with enough leftover gravy for TWO more meals!  And now the gravy has soaked up all the great flavors from the braciola AND a little hit of the provolone cheese.  Fab! 

Three dinners for the price of one=Can't beat that:)

After dinner, we didn't move much further then from under a pile of blankets and had a movie night watching "Devil".... 

A little hokey, but over all it was really good!  Very suspenseful....

Which brings us to a Sunday where the high temp for the day is suppose to be FOURTEEN degrees and where I can hear the wind whipping as I type this!  No Penny walk in the park THIS fine morning;)  We'll be staying in today, rootin on the Chicago Bears annnnddd.....alas, taking down my Christmas decorations.  Sigh...but it's time:)

Hope you have a WARM & relaxing Sunday! :)