What’s better than a home-cooked meal? A home-cooked meal that someone else made! I don’t get to have that much since being married and boy do I miss it. I recently had a chance to visit little Austin — oh, and my brother and sister-in-law and mom, too — and my mom was in charge of cooking. My brother has a big pomegranate tree in his backyard, and my mom was inspired to find a recipe for Mustard Pomegranate Pork Tenderloin.

My mom is much better than me at doing the presentation side of cooking!

Pomegranates are tricky, but we found the best way to get at the tasty, tangy seeds is to cut a bit off the top and extract the seeds in a bowl of water. Making into a sauce turned out to be a messy ordeal, but it was totally worth it. The sauce is really great and can be used for other things, like adding it to ranch dressing for salad! That was my mom’s idea, so I can’t steal it as my own.

Here's my mom carefully extracting seeds into the food processor to then strain them (although we couldn't find a strainer) to make the sauce. Be careful -- it's a messy recipe, but a good one!

Mustard Pomegranate Pork Tenderloin

from AllRecipes.com user Linda W.

Ingredients

• 1/4 cup pomegranate juice
• 1/4 cup fresh orange juice
• 1 1/2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
• 1 tablespoon honey
• 1 teaspoon minced garlic
• 1 teaspoon orange zest
• 1 dash cayenne pepper
• 1 (1 1/2 pound) pork tenderloin
• 4 tablespoons pomegranate seeds

Directions

1. In a clean jar with a tight-fitting lid, combine pomegranate juice, orange juice, mustard, honey, garlic, orange zest, and cayenne pepper. Tighten lid, and shake until everything is mixed well. Pour over pork tenderloin in a large resealable plastic bag. Seal bag, and refrigerate for at least one hour and up to 3 hours.
2. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Coat a large roasting pan with cooking spray. Remove tenderloin from marinade, reserving the marinade. Place meat in roasting pan, and arrange pan on center rack in oven.
3. Pour marinade into a small saucepan. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to simmer, and reduce volume by half. Remove from heat. Place 1/2 of liquid in a cup for basting, and reserve to use as a sauce.
4. Roast tenderloin in oven for 30 to 40 minutes, basting lightly with reduced marinade until internal temperature is 155 degrees F (68 degrees C) when measured in the thickest part of the tenderloin. Remove tenderloin from oven, cover with foil, and let rest for 5 to 10 minutes before slicing. Serve each portion with reserved sauce drizzled over top, and a sprinkle of pomegranate seeds.

FYI, we found that it needed to be cooked longer than the recommended 40 minutes.

Be sure to try this when you have a chance. It’s a really good meal using a fun and different fruit!