One Tenderloin, Two Tables: A California Spring Kitchen
On reinvention, leftover pork tacos, a citrus tajin margarita, kitchen music on, and the ancestral recipes you're making right now, without even knowing it
If you made Doug’s pork tenderloin last week, this is what comes next.
If you didn’t, make it first. Then come back here. Because the second meal is worth the first one.
Sometimes just the act of creating something from nothing inspires others to do the same. Something you love. Something delicious. Something easy. Something that brings the outdoors in. The farm fresh vegetables, the fruit on the trees, the breeze coming through the open slider, the afternoon light warming the counter, the giggles you get from dancing in your kitchen while making up a recipe as you go. This is so much about sharing your love of food with others, whether it’s an all day masterpiece or just a couple of things you threw together because it sounded good in your head.
There is something deeply satisfying about opening the refrigerator the day after a good dinner and finding the leftover tenderloin still sitting in its marinade, the liquid keeping it tender and flavorful overnight. I peek in and out of the fridge, door opening and closing. Thinking. Tinkering. Creating. The music goes on. The kitchen fills with something that smells like possibility. And without much of a plan, something new begins to take shape.
This is how I cook, often. No recipe card, no measurements, no plan. Just the refrigerator, the farmers market haul, whatever calls to me. And on this particular afternoon, a leftover pork tenderloin quietly waiting to become something else entirely.
I pulled out the pork. Cut it into small pieces. Peeked into the fridge again. What have I got? Red onion, peppers, tomatoes, avocado, a head of red cabbage, cilantro, limes. A container of roasted red salsa. Cotija in the back. Tortillas in the drawer. I may be slightly obsessed with Mexican food. Having that bounty in my kitchen is fairly regular. Then I think about the citrus trees in the yard, and somewhere in the back of my mind, a margarita with a tajin rim and three kinds of citrus sounds like the perfect thing to pair with the dish I just invented in my head, with my eyes, inspired by the music and the heat outside and the sustainability of it all.
I have a little of my Great Grandma Helen in me, I think. Always looking at what’s in the kitchen that may not last much longer and needs to show off its magic before it goes.
The table filled itself. All on its own.
I’ve been thinking today about the recipe boxes from Clara and Helen. The dishes that showed up at the table, passed down through generations, often never written down, surviving because someone kept making them and someone else kept watching. Those are the ancestral recipes. The inheritance. And somewhere in that lineage is this instinct I carry. The one that opens the fridge, takes stock, and makes something from whatever is there.
But there is another kind of inheritance being made right now, in every kitchen where someone opens the refrigerator with no plan and makes something their family will ask for again and again. The California spring taco spread you invented on a Tuesday afternoon. The margarita recipe you refined until it was exactly right. The dish that didn’t come from a recipe box but from your own life — what you love, where you live, what the season is offering.
That is you making the ancestral recipes for the coming generation. Without knowing it. Without meaning to. Just cooking the way you cook when you have good ingredients and the music is on and you hope someone will love what’s on the table.
This is one of those dishes.
