I cooked some elbow noodles to add to my previously mentioned pork experiment and am having the first serving as a belated dinner. Conclusion: not terrible, but next time I will use less rosemary, a bit less pepper, and probably no cinnamon. I'm not sure about the ginger.
I think this would probably work better with a real sliced apple, of a very tart cooking variety (rather than the over-sweet "eating" varieties), and maybe a splash of white wine to make up the difference in the liquid and further cut the sweetness, but yeah. Not terrible at all.
It's particularly not terrible in comparison to my old pork-and-applesauce dish, which I used to cook in the oven in a covered Corningware dish. That always came out with overly tough meat and tooth-aching sweetness in the applesauce. Here, the pork is nice and tender, and the spices and cranberries and onion (not to mention the slow cooking) have kept the applesauce from turning into a concentrated sugar blast.
Also, it is hard to go wrong with elbow noodles, in my personal opinion. :-)
I think this would probably work better with a real sliced apple, of a very tart cooking variety (rather than the over-sweet "eating" varieties), and maybe a splash of white wine to make up the difference in the liquid and further cut the sweetness, but yeah. Not terrible at all.
It's particularly not terrible in comparison to my old pork-and-applesauce dish, which I used to cook in the oven in a covered Corningware dish. That always came out with overly tough meat and tooth-aching sweetness in the applesauce. Here, the pork is nice and tender, and the spices and cranberries and onion (not to mention the slow cooking) have kept the applesauce from turning into a concentrated sugar blast.
Also, it is hard to go wrong with elbow noodles, in my personal opinion. :-)