Meal Swap - Teriyaki Pork Kabobs

I had my meal swap again last week. This time I made Teriyaki Pork Kabobs mostly motivated by the huge number of wooden skewers on hand and the pork loin that has been on sale for $1.99/lb at several stores.

I forgot to take a picture of all the unprepared ingredients, but here's what it looked like when I was ready to assemble The beauty of assembly was that I could sit down for the whole process - at 38 weeks preggo you can imagine how valuable this is!



The first step was to make the teriyaki marinade. Combine:
1/2 cup soy sauce
1/4 cup water
2 T. lemon juice
2 T vegetable oil
2 t. brown sugar
2 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 t ground ginger

Reserve 1/2 for basting, & add 1.5 lbs pork loin, cut into 1" cubes, to the remaining 1/2. Then let the meat soak for 1-4 hours.

The recipe I found called for zucchini and red pepper, but I didn't have red pepper nor did I want to go to the store. I looked up several other teriyaki kabob recipes and found that cherry tomatoes and onion were used frequently so I decided to use those with the zucchini.

I wasn't sure how the zucchini would hold up in the freezer so I did a little web research and found that blanching it would do the trick. Check.

As ever, I was very aware of the math needed to put these together. I counted the cherry tomatoes and made sure I made an equal number of zucchini pieces as I was cutting it into chunks. Then I figured out how many skewers I was making and how many of each veggie would go on each skewer. Unfortunately I only had enough to make skewers for the other swap members and didn't put any in my own freezer. I did however cut up and marinate extra meat so as my garden produces more zucchini and cherry tomatoes I can quickly make my own.

Last time I made skewers the sticks were too long for the tins we use and I ended up putting them in Ziploc bags with the pointy ends poking out of the bag and dripping sauce all over. Yuck! This time I got smart and used wire cutters to trim the wooden skewers about 1/2" so they'd fit in the tins. The chunks were too big to put two layers in each tin, so each family got two tins for their 8 skewers.

Here's the cost breakdown:

6# pork loin - $12

2 c. soy sauce - $2

water, lemon juice, veg. oil, sugar, garlic, ginger - $2?

Zucchini - Free from garden

Tomatoes - Free from garden

3 Onions - $2

Skewers - Free (leftover from last time)

Total cost - $18, so each meal was $4.50.

Katie