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After blathering on in recent blogs about Hubig’s Pies and Marshmallow Peeps, I headed back to the kitchen this week for another real-food experiment ¬-- this time, crown roast of pork. What’s not to love about a rack of pork chops fanned, inverted and trussed, its bones rising in dramatic fashion? It looks so holidayish. At Christmas, I stood in line at Calandro’s with a guy buying one and since then, I’ve been curious. His preparation, he claimed, was fool-proof. It involved stuffing the roast with cornbread-sausage-orange dressing and roasting it on a bed of mirepoix and fruit. “Wasn’t it dry?” I’d asked. Lord knows everything on a pig these days, except maybe bacon, ribs and Boston butt, can quickly taste like sandpaper. “Not at all,” he’d said.

Normally, you have to order a crown roast, but I found one at the ever-bountiful Whole Foods meat counter. My plan was to mimic Check-Out Line Guy’s recipe, but off-the-bat I was stumped. Sounds stoopid, but I had a helluva time figuring out exactly where to, well, stuff it. In the center, where I assumed a cavity would be and where the dressing and pork flavors could meld, the plump sides of each chop come together and block access. It didn’t seem right to plop raw dressing on top of that, with only a bone here and there to hold the wet mess in, but that was clearly the only other possible spot. Ultimately, I weenied out and cooked the dressing separately.

As for the crown roast, I doused it with olive oil, gave it several good passes of kosher salt and fresh ground pepper and sprinkled it with thyme. I surrounded it with chopped onions, sliced oranges, celery and garlic in a roasting pan and added a little water and orange juice. I managed to successfully stuff a few orange slivers into the center.

The trick was roasting at a high temperature (425 degrees) for the first half hour, then lowering to 350 degrees and cooking for 30 minutes per pound. I was surprised at how moist and flavorful it was, especially since it roasts fat side down. What I ended up needing help with, of all things, was the dressing. My mixture of cornbread, chicken stock, poultry seasonings, sausage and sautéed onions and celery fell flat. All I can figure is that it was a mistake to use Whole Foods fresh Italian sausage instead of regular ol’ breakfast sausage and that maybe my cornbread was too cakey in texture. Hard to believe you can screw up something simple like dressing, but at least I got the pork down.

Eat on.