Caramelized Pork chops and Apples

 

This one came from the New York Times Cooking pages. We had some Miso sauce from previous recipes so when this one appeared on my Facebook page we put in an order of pork chops with our regular weekly delivery.  Most of this was done in one skillet, although the miso was mixed with brown sugar and cider vinegar separately before it was added. We also had a side of mashed potatoes and paired this with a Chardonnay from Westport Rivers.

Old Bay - it's not just for seafood!

Hayes-Boh Joint Dinner Production

James: Pam recently found a recipe -- courtesy of our hometown global spice company -- for Old Bay Roasted Pork Tenderloin. The use of Old Bay in the preparation of crabs is Baltimore gospel, and Marylanders such as my brother apply it liberally to chicken. A quick search of this blog shows how we have employed it in various poultry and seafood dishes.

It seems quite natural to use it on pork, but I don't think I had tried that. I had also not combined it with brown sugar, though I do include brown sugar in many of the spicy rubs I make. 

In this case, I followed the recipe as written, except that I used the Big Green Egg and I attempted to adjust the timing to account for the fact that the cut of pork we get from Crescent Ridge is 3 pounds instead of the 1 pound in the recipe. I extended the time to a bit over an hour, and adding the vegetables after the pork had been cooking for about 10 minutes, rather than the reverse.

This turned out very well, though I could have done better with the timing. The vegetables would have been even better with a bit more time, and the pork would have been more succulent with just a bit less time. 

Pam: It turns out that it was also National Cranberry Relish day. 

We had some whole cranberries that we intended to save for Thanksgiving, but in coordinating with our fellow celebrants I discovered that they had an abundance of cranberries (and cranberry sauce) so it wasn't going to be necessary for me to bring any on Thursday. I offered to make two desserts instead and then set about finding a recipe worthy of National Cranberry Relish day. New York Times Cooking page to the rescue. This simple recipe for Spiked Cranberry Relish was quick, and I had all the ingredients I needed already at our beach house (where we usually have our Sunday dinners). I did make two substitutions:  Triple Sec instead of Grand Mariner and chopped walnuts instead of pecans. 

A delicious and visually pleasing meal all around.

Lagniappe

(by James) Although I have not combined sugar and Old Bay before, I have had it as part of a sweet treat. I was at a table overlooking Baltimore's Inner Harbor -- complete with the Domino's Sugar sign -- at the time. After visiting the remarkable Frederick Douglass maritime museum that is located in his former waterfront workplace, I had a quick bite downstairs at the delightful Ampersea restaurant. By "bite" I mean a sip of whiskey that had been distilled nearby and a dessert that one could only imagine being served in such a location: Old Bay crème brûlée. Highly recommend!

One Roast -- Four Sequestered Meals

Favored caption: Low and Slow
Alternate caption: Wash Me!

We keep our Big Green Egg on a very open, covered patio, which allows me to use it without much regard to weather. When taking the photo above, I realized that it means this vital cooking machine never gets a rinse.

Anyway, the key to this ancient cooking method is to get the temperature right and then leave it alone. In this case, the idea was to stay as close to 250F as possible over the course of 5 hours. At 4 hours I realized I had let it dip just under 200, but I opened the vents and got it back up to about 275, and left it for an extra half hour.

The entire time it was smoking -- complete with some hickory chips -- I did not once check on the pork shoulder inside. I was able to restrain myself because I had succeeded in 2017 with a pork butt, which I described in detail in There's the Rub!

We buy a small amount of local, naturally raised meats, rather than a large amount of cheap, factory-raised meat. The "it" in the previous paragraph is free-range, local pork shoulder from Crescent Ridge in Sharon, where most of the meat we buy comes from. Most of the rest comes from J.H. Beaulieu in Fairhaven.

Spicehound, by way of Crescent Ridge

This time I followed essentially the same process, with different details. The rub was an almost random mix of about ten savory spices at hand, plus a bit of chili-cocoa powder. (Yes, that is something likely to be in our kitchens at any time, without a special shopping trip.) I gave myself a break and included barbeque sauce in our Crescent Ridge order. Shortly before removing the roast, I whisked -- over medium-low heat -- some of the sauce with a ginger-honey white balsamic from (you guessed it) our friends at L.O.V.E. 

Something I neglected to describe in the 2017 post is how to pull the pork. While it is very hot and tender, it can be shredded easily in the pan with two forks. I shredded just enough for what we would need that evening and the next afternoon.

Two More Meals

I am writing this during the current pandemic because it is not only a Big Green Egg story -- it is more importantly a story about finding ways to eat well with what is in the house, in order to reduce shopping trips. Our state is a leader in adhering to social distancing, and our county is a leader within the state. This means we are doing pretty well at following not only the letter of the regulations -- keeping only essential businesses open -- but also the spirit: making VERY efficient use of our time in those businesses. So during this crisis we have spread out our typically frequent trips to be a week or more apart, buying a variety of foods that can be combined in different ways to keep meals interesting and to preclude dashing back in for one or two items (which I usually do several times a week).

This evening was exhibit A: I had bought some tortillas and several different cheeses. I had one specific dish in mind -- my famous sweet-potato quesadillas -- but also a vague notion that we would find something to do with the rest.

And thus was born the pulled-pork quesadilla! I should have taken a photo of process. Because the pork had now been in the fridge a couple of days, it was not fork-tender. I heated some oil in our indispensable cast-iron skillet and put a hunk of the pork shoulder in, over medium heat. I then used a fork and small knife to pull the pork and occasionally slice it, until it was in small enough chunks to facilitate two-fork pulling. Once it was heated through, I added about a quarter-cup of water to the pan and simmered for a few minutes so that the pork would be especially tender again. Because of the rub, I had no need to add spices at this stage. While heating a small amount of oil on our cast-iron griddle, I divided the pork between two tortillas (staying on one half of each -- I should have taken a photo).

And one more meal to come. Whenever I talk to my mom by phone in Annapolis, she asks -- knowing that we cook. a lot -- "What you having good for dinner?" And with the pandemic we're talking more often than usual.  On Saturday, I replied that I was roasting the pork shoulder, and she started talking about pot pies. We had many, many of the Swanson frozen variety when I was a kid, but then a couple times a year she would make one for real.

So that is what is going to happen with the remainder of this roast: good ol' Virginia pot pie with a flaky crust top, vegetables, and white sauce. I think I want a few more vegetables, so we are going to freeze this just for a bit -- to make better use of a shopping trip a week or so from now.

Pasta with Sausage, Squash and Sage Brown Butter

The New York Times cooking page never leaves the cook with too much guessing as to what goes into a recipe. The ingredients not mentioned in the name of this dish include olive oil, salt and pepper, and Parmesan cheese. This one took a bit of work with peeling, seeding, and cubing the squash. It also created a lot of dishes to wash. We had a pan to cook the pasta, a colander to drain it, a cutting board, a plate to cool the sausage, our cast iron skillet, and the cheese grater. Not to mention the dishes we ate off of. It did turn out to be a wonderful autumnal meal with a lot of leftovers for lunch.

The full recipe can be found here.

Pepper-forward Pasta

When looking for a dinner idea yesterday, I went to the original intent of this blog -- making use of the unused pages in cookbooks we already own. I headed to our easy chair with The Well-Filled Tortilla and Jane Brody's Good Food Gourmet. Followers of this blog -- or those using the search box at the top of the screen -- will know that we have made very good use of both of these volumes (though most of our Jane Brody references are to her earlier Good Food volume.

Because I had made quesadillas (with cheese!) for lunch, I opened Brody's book first. Because I had recently purchased a few boxes of Rao's penne pasta, I looked at pasta entries in the index, rather than thumbing through the book at random. I quickly found Fusilli with Hot Sausage, and quickly decided that penne would be a very reasonable substitution -- especially since Brody grants "or similar pasta" in the ingredients list.

I followed the directions on page 224 pretty closely, except with regard to proportions. Having purchased a pound of hot italian sausage, I used it all for Brody's first step (my second; see below). I  removed the casings and crumbled the sausage as I cooked it over medium-high heat. I then put it into a bowl (it was lean, so no draining was required).

My step before Brody's first step was to roast the peppers. The recipe calls for a 6.5-ounce jar of roasted peppers. Since my adventures with Mexican mole sauces, I almost never purchase roasted peppers, preferring to cook them directly on the stove. In this case, I went a little overboard and roasted three large ones on the rarely-used oblong center burner. I had done this and placed the peppers in a sealed bowl for sweating while I worked the indispensable cast-iron skillet.

Roasting peppers, in progress. I let them get much
more charred than this.

At some point I heated a pot of water with a little oil and salt. I never rush a sauce, but it is good to have the water ready when it is time to cook the pasta.

While the peppers were sweating -- I added some olive oil to the pan, reduced the heat and slowly cooked one diced onion (I have no idea how its size compares to the called-for 1-1/3 cup) and two teaspoons of garlic.

Just kidding about that quantity of garlic:

My friend Joe has convinced me
never to measure garlic again.

After I scraped, seeded, and cored the peppers, I pureed them in a blender with a can of tomato paste (instead of 2 tablespoons) and a little olive oil. I often do this when substituting home-roasted peppers for those that are bottled in oil. At this point I started boiling the pasta.

Once the onions and garlic were softened, I returned the sausage to the skillet and added the puree along with a modest dousing of cayenne pepper and a small bag of frozen corn. Yes, frozen corn. Because Jane Brody said so. The sauce was to simmer for 10 minutes -- it was quite thick, so I added a little bit of Malbec. Never a bad idea.

Once the penne was al dente, I drained it and combined it in a bowl with the sauce and several finely-sliced scallions.

The result was more delicious than photogenic, which I expected. That is why I favored this space with in-progress photos, rather than the final dish. We will definitely be adding this to the repertoire!

Chili Verde

Southwestern Cooking 1992, no author
Assembled by committee
This cover reminds me that I
sure miss saguaros!

On a very cold afternoon last week, I decided it would be a good day for an "original intent" recipe for this blog. That is, I would take take an actual cookbook from one of our shelves (we have a few shelf-fulls by now) and find something we had not prepared before.

Many of the recipes in this book are for dishes we have already prepared, either from similar recipes or from our own experiments born of seven years living in the Southwest.

I selected Chili Verde because it uses pork -- an ingredient we do not use very often -- and because it seemed perfect for fending off the cold winds of late January.

I began by cutting two pounds of lean pork shoulder into 1-inch cubes, and browning them in oil. I did this in two rounds to take advantage of our indispensable cast-iron skillet, transferring the browned pork to a deeper pot for the rest of the cooking.

I then added mild and hot peppers (seeded and chopped -- I use a variety of colors), cooking a few minutes to soften, and then scallions, and minced garlic. 

I then added cumin, coriander, and oregano -- if you are measuring these, you're not doing it right -- a can of chickpeas, and 3 cups of low-sodium chicken stock. (Beer or water are offered as alternatives). I cooked this for an hour (60-90 minutes recommended, but I had not started the recipe early enough to keep it lingering) and then added 2t corn starch dissolved in a small bowl of water, cooking for a few minutes further as a thickener.

The result was a thinner soup than any chili I have had, but it was delicious -- I credit the herbs. I chopped an avocado in 1/2-inch dice, tossed it with lime juice, and we used this to top each bowl. Avocado is notoriously quick to discolor, but the lime juice and a tight glass jar allowed us to keep half the avocado for leftovers the next day. Pam made delicious skillet cornbread for the second round.

This is a delicious, nutritious, easy, and cheap meal we will try again. 

Homebody Pork Chops

Having settled in for an early weekend, I was looking forward to grilling some locally-raised pork chops from Crescent Ridge, and hoping to do so without getting dressed up enough to go to the grocery.

During my first scan of recipes on Big Green Egg (yes, I was too lazy to get the printed cookbook from the shelf -- it's been a long week), I noticed something involving sriracha. I did not think we had any, and was beginning to consider recipes that would involve a run to Stop & Shop.

I did eventually check the fridge, however, and found that we had almost everything on the list for Sriracha Pork Chops. We had no bouillon or broth, so I used extra lime juice and sriracha. We had parsley (for scallops I prepared last week), which I substituted for the called-for cilantro. Last week I could not find fresh ginger at said Stop & Shop (I know, right?), so we have a little tub of partly-dried ginger. It seems to be working well, though I'll get the real stuff next time I see it.

In progress; in the foreground are small potatoes that had been roasting with olive oil, Old Bay, and a little water to prevent scorching (based on prior experience). I left them uncovered for the last 10 minutes or so.

NOTE: no measuring cups or spoons were involved in this recipe. It's marinade, not a cake.

ALSO NOTE: I do not play ziplock bags (called reclosable bags in the recipe for copyright reasons) for marinade. I just used a plate. I wrote this line prior to cooking, and now I am rethinking it. I do not like to waste plastic bags, but a tight bowl would have been a better option than a plate. I do not think the marinade did as much tenderizing as it could have. 

Completing the no-going-out-required program: brunch was berry waffles, which I can almost always make with ingredients on hand, and Pam noticed we have small potatoes that I can roast with some Old Bay once I heat up the Egg for the porkchops.

Plus, it is a cliché, but last weekend I visited Bolton Orchard and made some ... wait for it ... apple sauce! Pam had recently found an old-school apple corer at a yard sale.

Although the peeling apparatus does not work well, the coring and slicing are fantastic, and made short work of a half-peck of apples. I had put them in the slow-cooker for a few hours last weekend. We enjoyed some hot then, and the rest cold this week.

The end result was scrumptious and -- unlike much of what I have cooked lately -- fairly photogenic. The combination of flavors, textures, and temperatures was just right, and of course it all went very well with Malbec.

Pork Chops & Apple Sauce! (Plus potatoes and Malbec)

Having a Brady Bunch scholar in the house means that my weak imitation of Humphrey Bogart's "pork chops and applesauce" line (though he never said it and I could not remember that he was the guy we all think said it) led quickly to the definitive use of the line by Peter Brady.

There's The Rub!

The Big Green Egg combines ancient Chinese design with less ancient Southern U.S. enthusiasm for slow-cooked barbeque*. Careful readers of this blog will notice that we acquired our own Big Green Egg about two years ago, and have made extensive use of it as a glorified Weber-style grill. I mean no disrespect: the difference really is glorious!

Still, we have not tapped the full potential of the Egg until yesterday, when I used it for the first time as its developers in Georgia (USA, not Europe) intended. Good friends were spending part of the weekend at our beach-proximate house, so Pam opened Mary Kay Andrews' Beach House Cookbook for something worthy of the occasion.

She found the perfect recipe, with a title almost as long as the cooking time -- Smoked Pork Butt with Beach House Barbecue Sauce. It calls for applying a rub to a 4-6 pound pork butt or shoulder (notice my restraint with the butt jokes) and cooking it low and slow -- roughly an hour per pound at about 250F. She provides a recipe for a sauce to be prepared near the end of this cooking time.

As we made a grocery list, Pam noticed that the rub would be similar to the chipotle rub we recently purchased at Salem Spice -- a place that every serious cook should visit some time! So I set up the Egg with plenty of charcoal, started the fire and then nearly closed the vent to keep the temperature in the 250-300F range. I rinsed the pork butt, placed it in a small roasting pan and slathered it with olive oil. I then rubbed each side with the marvelous chipotle mixture. I then repeated the rub, with Pam's help sprinkling the powder as I turned the butt, as it is a job for more than two hands.

I placed the pan (without water, as would be required in some smokers) in the Big Green Egg and then simply did my best to keep the temperature in range for the rest of the day. This required very narrow openings in the upper and lower vents, and I probably should have checked the temperature a bit more frequently than I did. Still, I never let it get about 350F nor below 195F, and really kept it near 275F for most of the five-plus hours. The delicious rub meant that we were that house that was whetting appetites throughout the neighborhood. Low and slow.

I was proud that I managed to follow the advice in the Big Green Egg cookbook: monitor the temperature but to not monitor the meat itself. I did not open the Egg for more than five hours. When I did open it, the thermometer read exactly 200F in the center of the thickest part, and no more than 208F elsewhere.

Near the end, I whisked together the following over medium heat for about a half hour:

6 cups ketchup
6 cups apple cider vinegar
10 ounce Worcestershire sauce
3/4 cup brown sugar
2/3 cup dry mustard
1 stick unsalted butter
6T black pepper
1/4 cup Tabasco (a lesser hot sauce would also be fine)
3T salt

Actually, I did not do this, as it would have made the better part of a gallon of sauce. So math-team James divided each of these items by 6, making plenty of sauce for our purposes.

Results: Everyone loved this. Our friend Rob, who is the most expert grillmaster I know, was astonished that I had done gotten the slow-smoke method down so perfectly on my first try. And our friend Lisa, expert on all kinds of herbs and spices, pronounced the combination of rub and sauce perfect.

Needless to say, this paired very nicely with Malbec, and also with home-brewed American Pale Ale.

Pam followed this with divine apple enchiladas, which she will be posting soon.

Next time: With results like these, we will definitely have a next time. Instead of the perfectly suitable slaw I bought at the local deli, I will prepare -- probably the night before -- my cilantro-lime slaw.

*Note to New England readers: Barbeque (spellings vary) is a word of Taino (indigenous Puerto Rican) derivation referring to a variety of methods of cooking meats over wood or charcoal fire. It is not, as our university uses the term, a word meaning any food eaten out-of-doors.

Chili-Blackberry Tenderloin

Sweet-hot is a combination we like, so when looking for something new to try in The Big Green Egg, I opted for the first recipe I found when opening the eponymous cookbook. It has one of those spoiler-alert titles we sometimes find in cookbooks, really outlining our shopping list: "Chili-Spiced Pork Tenderloin with Caramelized Blackberry Sauce."

I started up the Egg so that it could reach 400F when I was ready. Then I went into the kitchen. I selected two pork tenderloins, brushing each with olive oil and sprinkling with chili powder, salt, and pepper. Honestly, I did not use a brush -- I just drizzled the oil on, and then rolled the tenderloins on a large plate, sprinkling as I turned them. Worked fine.

I set that aside and started working on the sauce. I had considered starting the sauce after I put the pork on the grill, but I decided not to, because the recipe is vague on grilling time, but implies (correctly) that it is fairly quick.

I started the sauce by melting 1/2 cup organic, granulated sugar in -- what else? -- a saucepan. As it started to caramelize, I whisked in 1/2 cup each of L.O.V.E. blackberry-ginger balsamic (the recipe simply calls for balsamic, but we knew how to make this even better) and chicken stock, along with an 8-ounce jar of Al's Blackberry Moonshine Jelly we had bought directly from the jellyman at the Coastal Wine Trail Festival just hours before. (Again, the recipe had simply called for blackberry preserves.) I brought all of this to a low simmer and left it on very low heat, covered, for 15 minutes while I cooked the pork.

With the Egg at 375, I put the tenderloins on the cast-iron grill-top for 5-minutes per "side." This was an occasion when I'm really glad that I follow my friend Rob's advice, using tongs for everything. The tenderloins would have been difficult to manage otherwise, but were very easy to turn this way. I mentioned the vagueness of the cooking time, which is something I am seeing more often in recipes, probably for food-safety reasons. It took 15-20 minutes, I'd say, to reach the desired 145F internal temperature. Having never cooked this kind of meat before, I was grateful to have an excellent thermometer (crazy-expensive but worth it for serious cooks), as I would have probably overcooked it otherwise.

Once the meat was ready to rest for a few minutes before slicing, I finished the sauce, which simply meant removing it from heat and stirring in 2T butter and a bit of salt and pepper. We ended up with a small pitcher of sauce -- way too much and way too thin for the purpose. The directions call for keeping it covered during the simmer and do not call for any kind of thickening ingredients. Next time, I think I'll try reducing it just a bit by cooking it ahead of time, uncovered.

Key words: next time. This was delicious, and I'll either try it again or will turn to one of the many tenderloin recipes on the Big Green Egg web site.

¡Ay, Patrón!

The title of this post refers to one of its least prevalent ingredients in this evening's preparation of champandongo, which I have also called Aztec Lasagna. See that post from earlier in the year for the geographic and literary background of this dish, along with a link to the basic recipe.

Since we have now made it several times, this post will focus only on the small departures from previous efforts. The first change was in the roasting of the peppers. We are fortunate enough to have two kitchens -- one in a place we find most weekends. The smaller "galley" at Whaling House has the essentials but not the frills, and it is where we are re-learning how to cook with an electric stove, just a few years after I had gotten comfortable roasting peppers directly on the burner of our gas stove.

Not a great photo, but at least I managed not to melt my phone!

Our alternative approach has been to buy roasted pepperrs (imagine!) or to roast peppers in the Cloverfield kitchen (yes, it is named for our former dog) before coming to Fairhaven. Friends recently told me of another way -- oven roasting. I did so this evening, and got the peppers both charred and gooey at the same time. I used one dark-red, long bell pepper and one jalapeño. The result was especially good for use in a sauce, as they were quite soft after I sweated them in a covered bowl. The only difficulty relative to roasting over fire was that the outer, charred skin was difficult to separate.

The other departure from our April endeavor was quite tiny -- when I was nearly done with the mole (mol-AY) sauce, I added just a splash of coffee-infused Patrón tequila. Thus this dish from a story in Coahuila (northern Mexico) used an ancient sauce from Puebla (central Mexico) and two ingredients from Oaxaca (southern Mexico). The other ingredient was the chocolate, brought recently from a friend who had visited Oaxaca last summer with our daughter.

How much coffee-infused tequila? Just a splash or three.

Grape Snausages

"Sausages with Grape Sauce" was a nice mid-week meal, as simple as its name. We found the recipe in Intercourses, a fun little cookbook that we have featured several times on this blog.

I began by cutting one pound of locally-raised sweet Italian sausages from Crescent Ridge into 4-inch chunks and placing them in boiling water for 15 minutes. Meanwhile, I preheated the oven to 425. I diced one shallot and put it with 1 T olive oil to cover the bottom of a one-quart baking dish (essentially a loaf pan).

I then used tongs to place the sausages in the pan, covered with about 3/4 cup of dry white wine and baked for 35 minutes (during which time I should have turned them once to brown evenly).

The last step was unusual but simple. Using the tongs, I removed the sausages to a shallow, warm bowl and then placed the baking dish on the stove top -- it had the wine, shallots, and some fat from the sausage in it. Over medium-low heat, I whisked in one tablespoon of dijon mustard. I then stirred in one cup of halved, red seedless grapes. When all was blended, I poured this sauce over the sausages and brought it to the table.

This was delicious with some Italian bread and butter, and of course the rest of that bottle of Sauvignon Blanc.

Getting Figgy with Breakfast

One of our favorite places to visit on the South Coast is Partners Village Store (and Kitchen), which is a great collection of small businesses, all of which thrive where none of them could survive alone. That is, about a dozen retail shops share both the space and the staff of 2-3 friendly and helpful clerks. The stores are full of charming gifts, books, toys, garden items, and clothing. Some of it is a bit expensive, but some of it is not. This is a business model that could work just about anywhere that a community wants to break the big-box-store cycle.

It was in the bookstore section of Partners that we discovered the kitchen calendar (aka Casa Hayes-Boh Nerve Center) for the current year. How could we not purchase a calendar made not only for the kitchen, but for this very blog? Besides having a folksy title, The 2015 Old Farmer's Almanac Recipes Calendar has una nueva receta cada mes -- a new recipe every month!

Careful readers will notice that this is MAY and we have not yet made anything from the calendar, but today was our day to start, and the result was delicious. I will stipulate for the record that this recipe turns healthy, vegan food (an apple and some figs) into food that is neither (with the generous addition of pork sausage), but it still was delicious. And maybe a clever reader will figure out a way to apply this concept to healthier and more sustainable ingredients.

The recipe calls for six large "baking" apples and a pound of sausage, I adjusted both quantities downward. As I browned the sausage, I cut the top 1/2 inch from each apple, leaving it with a flat top. Then I removed the core and most of the flesh, keeping the bottom and sides intact, about a half inch all around. This was not easy -- I used a small knife and a grapefruit spoon to get what I could without wrecking the cups I was forming. I chopped the apple into small bits. I added this and a few figs (the recipe calls for dried, but I used a few whole figs, again in small bits) back into the pan, along with cinnamon, brown sugar, and lemon zest.

I mixed this thoroughly and spooned it into each apple. There was plenty that would not fit, which I put in a small baking dish. I put the apples in a larger baking dish and sprinkled each with a bit more cinnamon and brown sugar.

I baked at 375F for 25 minutes, because I thought 40 minutes was too long. The result was an apple cup that was still firm to the bite, filled with deliciousness. It was not, alas, very pretty, even had my phone managed to focus better than this:

Dishing Up Chops

I include the cover of Dishing Up Maryland for this post, in part because I could tell right away that this was going to be a dinner that looked much better in person than it would in a photograph. I also want to draw attention to what is shaping up to be a very nice part of our cookbook collection -- both on our shelf and in our church's online store.

The selection of Tuesday's dinner menu started last week, when we decided to add a package of Farmer's Choice pork chops to our weekly order of delicious, organic milk from Crescent Ridge Dairy. We turned to the Dishing Up Maryland book when looking for a way to do justice with this pork that began with local grain fed to free-range, local pigs.

The only pork-chop recipe in the book begins with recommendations to shop the Greenbranch or Whitmore farms in Maryland -- this is a volume that celebrates local food! Of course, adjusting to our own locale was perfectly appropriate.

The recipe calls preheating the oven to 350 and then nearly splitting the chops lengthwise to form little pockets -- for the small, boneless chops we had, this was a bit of a challenge. I seared these in a small amount of EVOO and then set them aside. I added a bit of butter to the pan (indispensable cast-iron, of course) where I cooked finely chopped onion, celery, and apple. Here Snodgrass has specific apples to recommend, but I used what was in our fruit basket. Once the onion was soft, I added some cubes of wheat bread and salt, pepper, rosemary, thyme, and sage. I had never used fresh sage in my life. I had no idea what I was missing! I then added chicken broth (she calls for beef or vegetable) and dried cranberries and stirred until it looked like stuffing.

Rather than try to toothpick the chops back together, I spooned the stuffing in snugly, and set each chop on its side in a baking pan. I then baked for about 25 minutes. These chops were thin; otherwise the recommended 45 minutes might have been required.

We each enjoyed two small chops with some basmati rice left over from a recent burrito night, and considered it a complete -- and delicious -- meal. The stuffing was amazing and will give me plenty to think about in November, as I plan the Thanksgiving stuffing. I am very glad Pam found the high-karma dried (albeit sweetened) cranberries at Trader Joes. Had I gone with Craisins, we would not have known how delicious this stuffing could be. Of course, with a 45-minute cook time, blanched fresh cranberries would also have worked.

Another Ish Turkey Dish

Earlier this week, Pam made one of our comfort foods, known as Crusty Mexican Bean Bake. It is essentially a Sloppy Joe casserole on a biscuit-like base. Sometimes we make it with just beans, but since #1 Daughter was enjoying the Big Apple without us, we splurged and used a half-pound of ground turkey along with the kidney beans in that recipe.

Which left us with the second half-pound and several options on Wednesday night. On the short list was Turkish Turkey Taco, a favorite from The Well-Filled Tortilla that is emblematic of the situation that gave rise to this Nueva Receta project in the first place: at least 50 percent of our use of the book was that one recipe. Because we had all we needed for that recipe except tortillas (we've found somewhat reasonable tortillas for sale locally) and a jalapeño, we were about to follow that tried-and-true path again, when Pam decided to open the trusty tortilla tome in search of something a little different.

She found Spanish-style Ground Beef and Pork on pages 84-85, the name similarly connoting a dish that is probably as Spanish-ish as its precursor is Turkish-ish. No matter, it seemed -- and turned out to be -- both simple and delicious.

One adjustment I made was to heat olive oil infused with Persian lime, in place of ordinary olive oil, simmering onion, bell pepper (we used a frozen medley of this), pine nuts (the real deal this time), orange zest and thyme. I then added the ground turkey and a small amount of frozen breakfast sausage to get some of the mix intended in the recipe without buying more meat. Of course this was all browned in our indispensable cast-iron skillet, after which I added a generous pour-over of our home-vinted Chardonnay.

The result: warm and delicious! The next time I try this, I would avoid pre-cooked sausage, though I managed to chop it in pretty well. I would either use just turkey or perhaps a mix of ground turkey and Italian-style turkey sausage.

The Colonel's Apple-Stuffed Pork Chops, adapted for Sandy

About a year ago I wrote a post entitled "Oddly, I'm looking forward to reading this..." about a (then) forthcoming "food autobiography" of Colonel Sanders (of KFC fame). Last week I remembered the post, and did a bit of internet searching to find out if the book had been published yet. It had. Online. And for free. The catch is, you have to "Like" KFC on Facebook to get it.  I am pretty selective about what I like on Facebook, especially anything corporate, especially corporations I don't actually like. I was given the option, though, of making my "like" not visible to others, and so I downloaded the book (184 pages, including about 50 pages of recipes). I have not yet read the autobiography part, but I did browse through the recipes and noticed Apple-Stuffed Pork Chops, and we had recently ordered pork loin chops from Crescent Ridge Farm, which delivers our milk each week. We could not even remember the last time we had pork chops it is such a rare meal in our house, so we knew we had to make it good. We also have had a lot of apples lately, delivered in our CSA farm box this month, so this recipe was a good match of our local farm deliveries. We also knew that Hurricane Sandy might have caused our power to out at any time, and the recipe calls for cooking the chops for an hour in the oven. We decided to use our covered indispensable cast-iron skillet and cook on the gas stovetop instead, which was good, because our power did go out in the middle of cooking. These did not take long to prepare, and James and I working together had them ready for cooking in about 20 minutes. I chopped the apples and onions and cooked them in butter to soften. James mixed bread crumbs and fresh parsley (he braved the storm and got it from our garden!) and cut pockets into the chops. We then combined the bread and parsley mix with the apple and onion mix and added a bit of apple sauce (the recipe called for apple juice, but we didn't have any, and were not about to go out in the storm for that.) and stuffed the chops with it. The chops were then coated with flour and placed in the hot skillet and browned on each side. Then we turned down the heat, added more apple pieces and let them cook, covered, for about an hour.  Perfect. These were tender, and tasted like autumn. Eaten by candlelight, while the winds whipped and the rains came down, and paired with a South African Merlot/Cabernet Sauvignon "Le Bonheur" this meal was cozy and romantic.

Three Sweet Words

As I wrote in the Tortilla Heaven post nearly a year ago, at the beginning of this project, The Well-Filled Tortilla is among my very favorite cookbooks. Often, when scanning our collection for a new recipe, I will grab this volume, even if I also take another from the shelf. It is organized by the main filling ingredients -- veggies, chicken, beef, seafood. This weekend, I started near the end and found a few favorites we had made recently. I was also surprised by the number of seafood entries, which I had not really noticed. I was especially surprised by the illustration of how to dissect a squid, which I found somehow unsettling.

I kept thumbing toward the middle of the book, when three words jumped out at me. Three words that I cannot believe I had not noticed together: tequila, sausage, and mole. (I always feel obligated to stipulate that mole is not a rodent in this context, but a savory, sweet sauce: mol-AY. The words were especially intriguing because we had a half jar of mole sauce left over from our recent Champadongo ecstasy.

This recipe (Tequila Sausage with Chocolate Mole Sauce, p 108) actually called for me to make sausage, but not in the gruesome way one might imagine. Rather, I simply mixed a pound of ground pork with minced garlic, rubbed sage, fennel seeds, cayenne, salt, and tequila. The recipe called for 2-1/2 pounds, but for just the two of us, a pound was more than enough. I cut back a bit on each of the other ingredients, except the tequila. Rather than prepare and cook it right away, I let it meld in the fridge overnight, so that the spices and tequila were absorbed.

Dinner this evening was then quite simple -- steam a couple soft tortillas (30 seconds in the microwave, rolled up in waxed paper), heated the mole sauce in a saucepan (though I guess a molepan would do), and then cooked the sausage with a bit of oil in a hot cast-iron skillet. I cooked the sausage until crispy, meanwhile chopping a cold tomato. The result: hot, spicy, sweet, salty, and not too heavy. Hmmmmm.