Sweet and Sour Pork

As a young fellow I would go dancing on Friday and Saturday nights, it was a weekly ritual, I don’t recall dancing a lot, but there were girls there and I liked girls!  Then not long after I started in my first job, my mate Craig invited me to a Chinese restaurant in Hay St called Chopstick’s, suggesting we could eat before the dance.  I took up the offer and I will never forget my first feed of this exotic food, which included Sweet and Sour Pork with Special Fried Rice, I was hooked and it became part of my ritual!

I enjoyed trying the many different dishes on offer at Chopstick’s, but the meals always included the staple Sweet and Sour Pork dish.

Since those youthful days, I have ventured out and tried food from all parts of the world and I still today love to go to a new restaurant to try dishes from countries I have not been to, but can experience on a plate.  Sweet and Sour Pork is still a favourite and though Chinese is a seldom eaten food for us now, it still is added to the order when we do and it is a dish I have wanted to cook so many times in the past seven years, but I have not due to the fact that my wife does not like sweet and sour.

I had to put Jo’s dislike aside tonight, as I had Pork tenderloin I needed to cook and having arrived home a little wobbly from something I ate at my 3 hour lunch, I wanted something that wasn't going to tax me too much, this recipe I found thanks to Google was so easy I could have done it blindfolded.  I could not swear to how authentic it is, but honestly it is as authentic as I have had from any Chinese Restaurant!

Since that first time I have had eaten more renditions of Sweet and Sour Pork than I could poke a stick at,  some have been good, some better, some better left uneaten!  This effort tonight was well worth eating, well worth the effort and among the renditions that I have gone back for seconds for, but the really surprising thing I learnt from tonight’s meal, is my wife could not get enough of the  battered and fried meat.  She liked it so much so that by the time I got back to the stove after dinner to clean up and to store what was to be Saturdays lunch in the fridge, there was nothing left, she had snuck back into the kitchen on several occasions, taking one or two pieces at a time, until it was all gone!

Guess I will be cooking Sweet and Sour Pork again soon, I‘ll just have to do a half the sauce in future!!!