Pork Potpourri

I went to a casino a couple of months ago (last year, in 2009!) and I had THE MOST DELICIOUS pork chops in my entire life.

They were labeled as an unassuming "Pork Chops with Fruit Chutney", but after I took my first bite, I was in a gluttonous heaven. The pork was coated with bread crumbs and herbs, and the fruit chutney was a very wintry mix of cranberries and apples laced with cinnamon. The pork was juicy; the fruit chutney was flavorful. I kept cramming pork and fruit into my mouth to bask in the deliciousness. If no one else were at the restaurant, and the floor were cleaner, I would have rolled around, twitching in frenzied delight.

I got three servings. It was that good.

This recipe isn't exactly the same thing, but it helps stave off cravings until I get back to the buffet. It's from a recipe I found on Recipezaar while I frantically searched the Internet for the original. It does have the benefit of smelling really good while it's cooking, hence the "potpourri" title. Also, I needed a "p" word to keep up with the alliteration.

Pork, onions, and apples, marinating in their own juices. Is that kosher?

Browning some onions. They smell delicious, especially if you're starving.

Maillard-reactioning the pork.

Pork buried under a monochromatic layer of onions and apples. It's like a pretentious painting title.

Cranberries, courtesy of the school's cafeteria.

I think rice is a delicious accompaniment to pork and fruits. But I think rice is delicious with almost anything.

Pork Chops with Apples and Cranberries
(from Recipezaar)
Serves 4

• 1 large onion, halved, sliced
  
• 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
  
• 4-6 boneless pork chops, about 3/4-inch thickness
  
• Salt
• Pepper
• 1/4 cup flour
  
• 2 cups coarsely chopped apples (about 2 small apples or 1 medium apple. I've used Fuji and Granny Smiths/generic red apples from the school cafeteria. Both were delicious.)
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice
  
• 1/2 cup apple cider or apple juice (I have apple juice on hand so that's what I always use.)
• 3 tablespoons brown sugar
  
• 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
  
• 1 dash ground allspice
  
• 1/3 cup dried cranberries (Craisins!)
  

Heat a large skillet over medium-high heat. Melt the butter and saute the onions until they are lightly browned.
While the onions are cooking, salt and pepper the pork chops, and then dredge them in flour.
Once the onions are done, move them to a plate. Add the vegetable oil to the skillet and cook the pork chops, about 2 minutes on each side. Each side should be golden brown. If there's not enough space in the skillet for all of them at once, cook the pork in batches.
While the pork is cooking mix the apples, lemon juice, apple cider, brown sugar, cinnamon, and allspice in a bowl or something.
Once all the pork is cooked, add the onions on top. Be sure to wedge all the pork chops back if they were cooked in batches. Add the apple 'n' apple juice mixture to the skillet.
Bring the juices to a simmer, reduce the heat to medium-low, and cook uncovered for 5 minutes.
Cover the skillet and cook for 20 minutes. (I like to read food blogs and drool while I wait. The dish smells really fragrant and delicious.)
Uncover the skillet and add the cranberries. Stir and cook for 2 more minutes.
Alternatively, cook covered for 19 minutes, then add the cranberries and cook for 3 more minutes. I like my cranberries to be fully hydrated and soft.
Add salt to taste. I think a good sprinkling of salt enhances this dish, but I like salt.

So luscious....

Garlic Glorification

Who doesn't love garlic? People always complain about garlic and garlic breath, but everyone I know really likes garlic in his/her food.

To celebrate all things garlic, we made cheesy garlic bread, cream of garlic soup, and some green beans almondine with garlic salt for supper.

The garlic bread is from the Pioneer Woman Cooks blog. It is EXTREMELY filling. I couldn't finish my piece (and I eat a lot). This could have been because we added extra cheese, and our pieces were halves of the loaves.

Look at all of that cheese. @_@

I could, however, finish all of the garlic soup. It was pretty good for just garlic, bread, and onions with broth and cream. The hardest part was watching the bread and garlic to make sure it didn't burn. I failed that part....but the good news is, if everything isn't super burned, you can cut off the burned parts and resume cooking. That's what we did, and we didn't think it was that bad.

One thing I would have changed was the size of big pieces of garlic in the finished soup.  The next time I make this soup, I would either use a blender to puree the cooked garlic cloves or roughly chop them and add them back to the soup.  I love garlic, but even I find biting into a whole clove of garlic disconcerting.  I would have preferred smaller bits in my soup.

This is a good soup for a winter night.

Cooking some breads in a pot.

Bread + stock. It's getting more soup-like.

Wow! It looks like a Campbell's product?

Cream of Garlic Soup
(from Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin by Kenny Shopsin and Carolynn Carreño)
Serves 4

• 4 tablespoons butter
• 12 whole peeled garlic cloves
• 6 to 8 inches of baguette, cut into cubes
• 2 thick slices onion, chopped
  
• 3 cups chicken stock
• 3/4 cup heavy cream
• 2 teaspoons grated Parmesan cheese
• Ground nutmeg (optional)
• Salt and pepper (optional)

Heat butter in a saute pan (or pot) over high heat. When the butter is hot, but before it browns, add the garlic and bread cubes. Brown them on all sides, but watch to make sure they don't burn. (This happened to me. I didn't watch the pot closely enough and burned some of the garlic. I ended up cutting off all the burnt segments so the soup wouldn't be bitter.  While you have the garlic out to cut off the burnt sides, you could chop or puree them.)
Add the chopped onion and saute until soft and translucent but not brown, about 4 to 5 minutes.
Add stock and whisk. Keep whisking until the bread is sort of disintegrated into the broth. The crusts didn't really disintegrate for me, so I eventually gave up.
Add the cream and Parmesan cheese.
Stir some more until cream is heated. Add salt and pepper if desired. Also, add the nutmeg now if you don't top the bowls with it.
Ladle out the soup into bowls (or plates?). Season to taste with salt, pepper, and nutmeg if you haven't done so already.

It's my soup in a bowl! (OooOOhhh.)
Soup in a bowl? Dick in a box? Get it? No?

One of my roommates made the green beans almandine from what I can only assume is a secret family recipe. It was a nice green counterpoint to the cheesy bread and creamy soup.

Happy (Belated) Halloween

Halloween is one of my favorite holidays, and there's no better way to spend it than by eating 5 pounds of cookie cake.

Huge Halloween cookie cake with festive Halloween decorations!

Look at that thick layer of buttercream sandwiched between two huge cookies!

It took us about 2 weeks to eat half of it.

Pumpkin Party

Recently, the Residence Hall Association at our school put on a pumpkin party, and I was all gung-ho. I even volunteered to make the pumpkin cookies when the designated pumpkin-cookie-maker fell ill.

During the event, I wanted to try all the pumpkin foods, so the pumpkin-shake maker made me a huge pumpkin shake, with a huge swirl of whipped cream and a generous dash of cinnamon on top. I took my first pumpkin-y sip and then realized as the cold, creamy drink hit my taste buds that I don't like the taste of pumpkins. Surely, it's just the uncooked pumpkin pie filling I don't like, I thought, as I ate a slice of pumpkin pie that I later ended up spitting out. Maybe that pumpkin pie is a little stale since I had to buy it yesterday at Sam's Club, I tried to convince myself, while I choked down a pumpkin cookie I had just baked.

I found out I'm not a huge pumpkin fan, probably because I never ate pumpkin things growing up. My earliest and one of the only memories of eating pumpkin products was eating a pumpkin seed in the first grade. I sucked off the salt and then spat it out. I guess that was a pretty indicative incident....

Anyway, if you like pumpkin, you might like these cookies. They are cakey, and I'm told, taste like pumpkin pie.

Bright orange cookie batter

We had to continuously open the oven door to check on the cookies because the oven we used didn't have a window or a timer.
The cookies looked like little piles of vomit while they cooked, but don't let that stop you.

Pumpkin goodness. If that's what you're in to.

Madwizard's Pumpkin Cookies
From Recipezaar
Makes about 48 smallish cookies

• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup brown sugar, firmly packed
• 1 cup butter, room temperature
• 1 cup pumpkin
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 large egg
• 2 cups all-purpose white flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
  

Preheat the oven to 350°F.
Cream the butter and both sugars until fluffy.
Add vanilla, egg, and pumpkin and blend.
Add flour, baking powder, baking soda, and cinnamon. Blend some more.
Scoop out the batter onto a baking sheet, a tablespoon at a time. Bake for about 10 minutes, or until they don't look glossy.

Commencement Chops

I'm excited to finally have my own food blog. I am a big follower of other people's food blogs, but until now, I've never documented the things I cook and eat, mainly because:
1) I infrequently cooked,
2) I usually don't document when I cook things,
both signs of a bad food blogger.

I still won't call myself a "food blogger" or "foodie," but I will officially start sharing what I've eaten with strangers on the Internet, starting with these pork chops my roommates and I made tonight following our disappointment with our school's cafeteria food.

The original recipe is from Everyday Food, a Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia production(!). We kind of changed the cooking style because we didn't know how to use the broiler on our oven, but we did know how to cook stuff in a pan on the stove. The amount of pork you want to add to the pan each time is up to you. I originally started to cook the meat in batches to get a sear on each piece, but then I got hungry and just started dumping it in and letting it cook.

The finished dish.

There always has to be a close-up shot, right?

Asian-Style Pork
Adapted from this Martha Stewart recipe.
Served 3.

• 5 tablespoons soy sauce
• 2 tablespoons hoisin sauce
• 2 cloves garlic, crushed
• 1 tablespoon honey
• 3 boneless pork loin sirloin chops
• Oil, for cooking
  

Cut up the pork in 1/4 inch slices.
Add the rest of the ingredients except the oil in a bowl or some sort of container, mix, and add pork.
Marinate the pork (the original recipe calls for at least 1 hour, but we ended up leaving it in its plastic box for about 45 minutes while our rice cooked).
In a pan over medium-high heat, add some oil (we used about a tablespoon), and add the pork. Cook for about 1-1.5 minutes per side.

Serve with rice for a nice, collegiate 11 o'clock dinner.