Minced Pork and Spinach with a Sweet Mash on the side

Okay, so I lied. It’s not really a mash. I just kind of baked the potatoes, removed the skin and half-heartedly forked them. No added salt or cream, just the way they are was perfectly fine for me.

I bought the sweet potatoes on a whim. I like their kind of lightly sweet flavour, and the fact that it is chock full of awesome vitamins. Plus, it lends a nice balance to a dish, instead of it being all salty/savoury, it has a nice balance of sweet/savoury/salty/yummy.

The minced pork with the spinach is one of my prouder achievements.

I bought fresh spinach but couldn’t really figure out how to work it into the dish without making it a boring tasteless side (I would have just sauteed the leaves).

So I chopped it up roughly and mixed it into the raw pork with a whole bulb of garlic (I loooove garlic), and some spices, cooking sake, green onions and sesame oil.

Turned out GREAT.

And it’s pretty healthy from my point of view.

I only added a tablespoon or two of sesame oil, the pork was very lean, the sweet mash didn’t have any added seasonings or cream, and the spinach was a nice little bonus of veggie in there.

I don’t really like to cook much with butter or cream (never grew up with dairy in the house except for occasional cheese on bread, or random milk cartons), so I just haven’t gotten used to the taste of it.

Minced pork is extremely tasty on its own, and if you get the lean stuff, it can be a bit dry after it’s done cooking, but it’s so tasty, you don’t care because it has a nice sauce at the end to make it a bit juicy if you use some soy sauce.

Very good to eat with fresh, fluffy Japanese rice (have to wash the rice and soak it for an hour before cooking, by the way).

This stuff is just so easy to make, it kind of boggles my mind that people claim not to know how to cook…. or they think it’s all about measuring, cooking perfectly, mixing sauces..

Hell no! I don’t measure ANYTHING and I make up recipes along the way based on what I have in the fridge.

My sister is always amazed I can look in her bare fridge and think of something else to do with her leftover hodge podge of veggies and condiments.

She just sticks to one recipe because she doesn’t know how to deviate from chicken breast with some sprinkled Montreal Chicken Spice and a salad on top.