Well I am certainly cookin' my little tush off this month, eh? Not bad. Tonight's recipe is in Rachael's Get Real Meals book, but I have to admit it's not one I would have normally chosen on my own. It was highly recommended by Ro, and since I have faith in the judgement of my fellow Lamb's, I went for it. With positive results!INGREDIENTS:
-1 large head or 2 small heads broccoli
-3 garlic cloves, chopped
-Salt and pepper
-2 tbsp EVOO
-4 boneless pork loin or rib chops, 1 1/2 inches thick
-2 tbsp butter
-1 Spanish onion, thinly sliced
-2 tbsp fresh thyme leaves, chopped
-1 Granny Smith apple, cored and thinly sliced
-2 pinches ground nutmeg
-1 tsp ground cinnamon
-1 cup chicken stock/broth
-handful of fresh flat leaf parsley, chopped
-the juice of 1 lemon
DIRECTIONS:
-Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
-Rachael has complicated instructions for cutting the broccoli. Basically, cut the big chunky stem off and then cut it into bite sized pieces. Easy enough. On a baking sheet, toss the broccoli spears with the garlic, salt, pepper, and a generous drizzle of EVOO. Place the broccoli in the oven and roast for 15 minutes.
-While the broccoli is roasting, preheat a large skillet over high heat with 2 tbsp of EVOO (twice around the pan). Liberally season the pork chops with salt and pepper and sear on both sides for 2 minutes, or until they are golden brown. Remove the chops from the skillet and reserve. Add the butter to the pork skillet, add the onion, thyme, sliced apple, nutmeg, and cinnamon. Cook, stirring frequently, for 3 to 5 minutes, or until the onion and apples are tender. Add the chicken stock and bring up to a simmer. Add the pork chops back to the pan and cook for 5 to 7 minutes longer, or until the chops are cooked through. Add the parsley and lemon juice to the chops and stir to distribute.
-Serve the chops topped with the spiced-apple pan sauce alongside the roasted broccoli spears.
COMMENTS:
-I'll start by saying...yummy! We love the spiced apple sauce, verrry good with the pork. As for the broccoli...well, as always, I didn't use actual cloves of garlic, but the prechopped garlic you get in a jar. And the garlic was all burned within 10 minutes of roasting. So I took it out a little early. The broccoli was still pretty good, though we probably could have done with less of that burned garlic taste. Maybe sticking to the fresh cloves is a better idea?
-As always, we skipped the onion.
-I forgot the parsley and lemon at the end. Let me tell you why. "Searing" pork chops creates quite a bit of smoke/steam from the pan. Even though we had our overhead fan on, apparently our apartment's smoke detector is very sensitive. VERY SENSITIVE. So as soon as we started cooking the pork chops, one of us constantly had to run over to the smoke detector in the hallway and fan a towel in front of it so that it would stop screeching. We also had to cook with the porch door open for ventilation (mind you, 30 degrees in Albany today). Not to mention my mom called in the middle of all this to tell me her and Bill have 2nd row seats to the Huskies game tonight (woooo UConn!). So maybe you see why by the end of the cooking, I really could not have cared less about parsley and lemon.
Anywho, it was still good without it. :)
No comments:
Post a Comment