(pictures have been taken, but not uploaded, you’ll see them tomorrow!)
Dragging out a chop from the freezer for today, which is always a guaranteed success. Tracy likes pork chops, and I think I’ve become pretty good at cooking them. The intent here it to do it up on a cast iron pan, and then use the drippings from the pan to make yorkshire pudding. Yummy! On the side, I’m doing a quick slaw of grated carrots with some red wine vinegar.
Here are the recipes I’m using:
Carrot Slaw:
– Some carrots
– Some red wine vinegar
– Dash of olive oil
As the concept of quick is vital here, I just ran the carrots through the grater on my food processor, threw in a couple of tablespoons of red wine vinegar and the last of my precious olive oil. Tossed with my fingers, and serve. This is a favorite of mine, it’s tasty, refreshing, and healthy.
Pork Chops:
– Pork chops (strangely enough)
– Couple teaspoons each of cumin, coriander, and black pepper
For the spice rub, I toasted the whole seeds in the pan for the chops, and then threw them in my coffee grinder. Once done, they got rubbed over the chop.
Now for the chop itself, I like thick pork chops, cooked to medium, and juicy as you can get. Just to restate myself – medium. Pork does NOT need to be cooked until well done. In the good old days, pigs ate a great deal of garbage, and from this they got a parasite, trichinosis which could survive until it was killed by heat and be transferred to a human. Not food poisoning. Modern farming conditions have effectively eliminated this parasite as a threat, and so pork can now be cooked to a mild pink, instead of white. This means the leaner meat we get nowadays can remain juicy and tender, instead of with the texture of shoe leather.
Anyways, my method of cooking chops is simple. Cast iron pan on maximum heat until it’s white-hot, and then sear the chops for two minutes on each side. Remove from heat, cover with foil, and leave for ten minutes. Dead simple, and you get incredibly juicy, easy pork chops this way. Also, some smoke in the kitchen.
Porkshire Pudding:
– 2 cups flour
– 2 cups milk
– 1/4 cup drippings
– 4 large eggs
– 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
Holy shit did THIS fail. Haha. Wow. So I figured out the basic idea being yorkshire puddings, and recently made dutch babies (a sweet variety without pan drippings) that turned out wonderfully. So I decided to give yorkshire pudding a shot. The idea here is you just blend the above ingredients, and then pour onto pan drippings (usually from a beef roast, I used my chop drippings) and then throw it in the oven at 400 for a half an hour.
Well, I think I screwed up this recipe. The recipe above was cut in half, and it ended up having too much flour. What I hoped for was this puffy spectacle of a yorkshire pudding, Instead, I got this:
Whatever. My porkshire flatbread was actually pretty tasty – not a complete loss, but certainly did not end up the way I expected it to.
The Verdict:
This is really “just another night with Dave and Tracy” food. It took very little time to whip up, the chops were delicious, the porkshire flatbread was filling if anything, and the carrot slaw vanished from my plate in seconds. It doesn’t seem to have been as popular with Tracy, but oh well, more for me!
