Tasty Pork Roast

Today I cooked up one of my favorite foods, pork roast.  It is relatively inexpensive, tastes great and provides lots of good protein.  Since I'm trying to up my protein a bit these days, which is surprisingly hard, this last is a good thing.
This time I used a pork loin roast of about 4 lbs (bone in), but in the past I've used the even less expensive shoulder or butt roasts.  The secret to the roast is brining.  Brining is simply soaking the meat in a salt water solution for a few hours.  Most brines I've seen call for sugar, but since I'm avoiding sugar like the plague, for a long time I've just used salt.  Kosher salt specifically.
To make the brine I use 1 quart of water (more or less) and 1/4 cup of salt (more or less) for each pound of meat.  Today that resulted in about 1 gallon of water and 1 cup of kosher salt.  Just dissolve the salt in the water and add the meat and stash in the refridgerator for about 1 hour (more or less) per pound of meat.   You can go longer, but I've read not to go more than 8 hours.  You can some herbs or fruit juices or sliced apple if you want, this is supposed to draw the flavors into the meat, but I've never noticed much effect from that.
Once you've brined the meat, you will want to drain it and dry it off to help make sure you get nice crispy outside.  You can also add some spices at this point.  Today I added a BBQ flavored rub I made from a recipe in the new Atkins book which is quite nice.  Put the roast on a wire rack on a baking sheet.
Preheat your oven to 500 degrees and once it is hot put the roast in and set a timer for 30 minutes.  This first bit of cooking is to get a nice crispy outside, which is especially tasty if you have used some sort of spices.  Once the timer goes off, turn down the oven to 350 degrees and continue cooking until the internal temperature of the roast is about 150 degrees.  For a 4 pound roast, this takes around an hour.
Once the roast has reached the desired temperature, remove from the oven and cover with foil to let it "rest" for 5 or 10 minutes.  I can never seem to wait that long but it is supposed to help keep all the juices from running out of the meat when you cut into it.
You can also cook whole roaster chickens using this same method.  I've found both chicken and pork come out very juicy and tasty this way, even poorer cuts of pork like the shoulder or butt roasts.