Lombo di Maiale alla Spiede (Italy)

This is a recipe for a pork kebeb made with tenderloin and ciabatta and it looked absolutely amazing in the book.  Amazing, that is, apart from it including what I consider to be a rather large amount of rosemary (which is basically anything more than a very small pinch).  I really hate rosemary.  I find it overpowers  anything that it's on and so I was really hoping that this would be the exception.  

What I was excited to try was kebabs with bread on (since it had never occured to me to try this). So you might say we were both looking forward to seeing how this would turn out. 

We did have to make a small alteration to the recipe in that these kebabs should have been made on woody rosemary stalks.  Unfortunately, Soph's rosemary plant had recently died so we had to buy stalks from the supermarket, which were obviously not strong enough to hold or skewer the pork and bread so we made them on bought wooden skewers instead. Which I suppose I am thankful for.  

The pork needs to be marinated for 'as long as you can afford' according to Allegra, so we started it marinating at 11am to be cooked at around 7:30pm - so plenty of time really. As for the marinade itself, it's quite simple and nothing we hadn't tried before. 

When it came time to prepare the bread was when we were trying something new.  We bought an Italian, parmesan ciabatta for this recipe and had to dip the pieces into melted garlic fat before putting them on skewers.  This was both messy and unappetizing when you see the amount of fat absorbed by the bread.  This feeling was quickly overcome however when we saw (and smelled) them cooking. 

The recipe says they should cook in the oven but we were so excited to have the sun that we barbecued them on the balcony. Unfortunately this turned out to not be such a good idea since the bread cooked much quicker than the pork so after about 20 minutes on the grill, we brought them inside and put them in the oven.  

I think this would have worked very well if we hadn't gotten distracted and forgot about them. They ended up cooking for a good 20 minutes or so longer than they should have so some of them were a little too dry. 

We did still all like them - even though the bread was a little too crispy.  I think if they'd have been cooked for the right amount of time they would have been a big hit.