Blueberry Pork Dinner Party

I had made plans for a dinner party with my brother and his girlfriend, so I decided to use this recipe, since it plates so nicely. (It's always nice to serve guests a pretty dish, isn't it?)

For budget reasons, I decided to use pork rather than salmon. It worked out nicely; it turns out our guests had eaten salmon for dinner the night before, anyway.

First, a disclaimer: my husband helped me with the roast. The dinner party was moved a day early at the last minute, so we had to tag team to do all the cleaning and cooking that I thought I would have more time to do.

One thing that surprised me about this recipe was that it calls the sauce a "pan sauce" (which implies that it's made by deglazing a pan after frying up a piece of meat), but it doesn't require deglazing at all. So I thought I would try the deglazing method.

First, my husband marinated the roast, and then seared it in the pan. Then he set it up to go in the oven. He cleverly put some of the blueberries, along with some of the marinating liquid under the roast.

The pork had left this lovely stuff in the pan when it was seared. Following his suggestion, I deglazed it with the blueberries and the drippings from the roast. Genius.

By this point, the sauce was already packed with flavour, from the roasted blueberries, the stock in the marinade, and the drippings from the roast. Roasting fruit, as you probably know, really adds whole new dimension to its flavour. I added more fresh blueberries, some maple syrup and brown sugar, lemon juice, balsamic vinegar, and thyme.
To make use of the rest of the blueberries, I made this refreshing salad with blueberries and goat cheese, and a lime-curry-yogurt dressing (plain yogurt, honey, lime juice, curry powder).
And the main course: roast pork with savoury blueberry balsamic sauce, potato salad with mint and peas (to make use of the rest of the mint), and fusili pasta tossed with pesto, mushrooms and parmesan cheese.
The sauce turned out very multi-dimensional and I loved that. It was very intensely flavoured and I probably should have diluted it a little. This particular sauce didn't really need the mint because it turned out so savoury from the pork drippings. Even if I don't make this exact sauce again, I'll definitely use the basic method (roasted fruit pan sauce) again.