What’s For Dinner: Pork Souvlaki

My wife has been hounding me for a while now to do a blog on food. I have the tendency to make pretty awesome meals, although some might say sandwiches are my specialty, I fancy myself a proper chef.

I’ve decided to put together some of my favourite barbecuing recipes, and will be putting them together in a series called “What’s for Dinner.” I’ve tried to simplify them to make it easy for everybody to do. If you can’t do it, just pop ’round and we’ll do it together over a bottle of beer.

Being Greek, the first dinner I wanted to share is pork souvlaki. If you’re not a fan of the “other white meat” you can replace pork with chicken but I don’t like to because it tends to be dry. We make this meal all the time in the summer, and it is easy to prepare ahead of time.

 Pork Souvlaki

Ingredients:

Pork tenderloin (3 tenderloins will feed a family of 4)
Half Lemon (juice)
Fresh parsley (chopped)
Sea Salt
1 Yellow Pepper
1 Red Pepper
1 Onion

Step 1: Cut tenderloin into 1″ by 1″ pieces, removing excess (shiny) fat. Try not to make the pieces too big.

Step 2: Cut peppers into 1″ x 1″ pieces. Slice onion into quarters and separate layers. You can cut some of the bigger layers in half. Get ready to skewer the meat and vegetables!

Step 3: Put the pork, onion and peppers on the skewer tight together, alternating between meat and vegetable. Salt liberally.

Refrigerate for a few hours, or over night. The salt will make the pork juicy and flavourful.

Step 4: Grill. Turn at least four times (one for each side). Don’t let it over cook!

Step 5: When the meat is cooked, remove the skewers from the grill. Put on a plate, add the juice from half a lemon and sprinkle chopped parsley.

Tsatziki

Ingredients:

1 tub Plain Liberte Mediterranean Yogurt (if your grocery store doesn’t have it, buy Greek Yogurt or, as pictured above, plain yogurt)
1/2 Cucumber, grated
2 cloves of Garlic, chopped/crushed
1/2 Tablespoon of Dry Mint
Salt to taste

Step 1: Grate cucumber using a cheese grater into a sieve. When you have grated the cucumber, add salt and use a spoon to push the excess water out of the cucumber. Make sure you put the sieve under a bowl to catch the excess water. [If you don’t have a sieve, put the grated cucumber in paper towel and ring out the water.]

Step 2: Put the yogurt in a bowl (we used a measuring cup). Add the cucumber. Crush garlic cloves into the yogurt.

Step 3: Add mint. Add more salt to taste. Combine.

It is important to say that this should be made to your taste. Sometimes we add an extra clove of garlic, more mint or olive oil, but it all depends on what you and your family like.

Filling your Pita

The best part about this dinner is that you can eat it different ways. We chose to put it together in a pita for today, but you can also make it like a salad (toast the pita – yum!). Include whatever you prefer in the pita – the combinations are endless!

Ingredients:

Cabbage
Lettuce
Tomato
Cucumber
Lemon (optional)
Onion (that you cooked with the meat)
Red & Yellow Pepper (that you cooked with the meat)
Pork
Tzatsiki

NB: If you’re planning on adding cabbage use a potato peeler to cut it instead of slicing it. It comes out thin and it is easy to do! I love doing this for salads or coleslaw.

Assemble your pita. Wrap it (or not) and enjoy!

FYI: This is how our kids ate it.

If you make this recipe, let me know what you thought!