How do you like your pork?
Visions of a Sunday roast with crackling, crispy roast potatoes, 3 veg and loads of apple sauce perhaps?
I’ll stop you there.
We don’t do Sunday roast, but we do have CHOPS!
Having access to a freezer for the next few weeks, we have taken advantage of the 3 for £10 meat offer in the supermarket, purchasing 4 chicken breasts, 16 rashers of bacon, and 6 pork chops. This is more than sufficient to cover our stay (equates to 11 meat meals) as I can get a meal for the two of us out of a medium-sized chicken breast, and in later years in the cottage a single chop was adequate for a sweet and sour.
However, tonight we had pork chops, green beans, carrots, baby potatoes and ‘a Di special’ (read throw anything in) sauce.
It’s at times like this that I miss our apple tree and the luxury of picking fresh what we needed for sauce or a crumble, so today I thought I’d buy a couple of bramleys from the grocer to go with our dinner.
They looked lovely, but when I picked one up, it was covered in a sticky residue which I can only describe as wax. This is obviously the latest storage method, after all, it works for cheeses doesn’t it.
I decided not to bother and to use whatever I had in the fridge and cupboards.
I knew I had red, green and yellow peppers and some onions, so this is what I did.
Rather than use the oven and ‘bake’ the chops as I used to do in the cottage, I cooked them in water in a frying pan.
The beans, carrots and potatoes were all doing nicely in a single saucepan with a sprinkling of rosemary.
I sliced a selection of peppers and an onion, then took the almost cooked chops out of the pan and added these vegetables to the stock with a stock cube, clove of garlic, and half a teaspoon of dark brown sugar, stirring often so that it didn’t catch and adding a little more water so that it didn’t get too dry.
When they all started to go soft, I returned the chops to the pan and covered it, reducing the heat until the meat was fully cooked, again making sure it didn’t dry out.
It was a tasty change from apple sauce and the pair of us thoroughly enjoyed it, so I’ll do it again.
I’d like to think it’s a healthy option as I used water rather than oil to cook the meat, but I suppose the sugar countered that. It was still nice though.
pensitivity101 