June 22, 2015

Lime-Glazed Pork Chops

June 22, 2015/ Blair Cowan

Pork chops are the stupidest food. I challenge you to come up with a stupider food, truly. You would think a pineapple would be stupider, on account of how dumb they look, but they're not. Only a pork chop is that stupid. And I'd be willing to bet even Eleanor would agree with me (especially based on how few pork recipes I've found in the box so far.

Here are all the reasons pork chops are stupid:

You have to cook them until they have the texture of a shoe in order for them to be safe to eat.
They taste like leather (see above).
They're so thick and so dense that, no matter what you marinate them in, they're never going to soak up the flavour the way a steak or fish does.
Also, somehow the awfulness of pork chops is magnified because of how good all the other cuts of pork are. I mean, bacon and lardons come from the same animal! Why would you bother with a pork chop when you could have those?!

When Judson and I had been dating about a year and had just started to learn how to cook together, I moved into an awesome apartment in an old schoolhouse. But when I moved in, the studio I had paid for wasn't ready and so I had to live in a giant unit twice the size of the one I was supposed to be in. Because the unit was so much bigger than I had anticipated, I had no furniture for it except my bed, so the living room was just a giant empty space with hardwood floors and floor-to-ceiling antique windows. It was basically a dance studio and I got to live there for three months at an unreasonably cheap rate until my smaller unit was ready.

Anyway, my first week there, Judson and I decided we'd make ourselves some pork chops. It was about this time of year, and Judson had just learned to cook and was feeling ambitious. So we bought a butternut squash, some pork chops, and some plums and kumquats to cook with the chops. I, however, had not yet unpacked my kitchen, so we had to cook the chops in a disposable pie tin, and halfway through the cooking process, Judson jabbed a hole in the dish with a sharp knife, and we leaked meat drippings all over my fresh clean oven. Unfortunately, we had no idea what we were doing, and it somehow took us over two hours to cook the meal. When it was finally finished (around 11pm on a weeknight), we realised that I had nowhere for us to sit to eat, and so we sat on the floor of my living room, criss-cross applesauce, leaning against the bare walls, drinking cheap beer and eating too-done pork chops off of our laps. That may be the best memory of pork chops I have, and it's not even a great one.

Nonetheless, I find myself with pork chop recipes and a husband who loves nothing better than pig. Luckily, this one involved lime peel, cloves, and grated lime zest, so I thought maybe those ingredients would overcome #1-4 above. Alas, I was wrong.

Maybe it's the lack of a grill (though I feel like any recipe that can't be tweaked to account for the lack of such a rudimentary cooking implement isn't worth it anyway), but we failed at this recipe miserably. I'll say this: it was easy, and cooking these made our entire house smell amazing for an entire day. But the sauce burned in the pan, and even though the chops weren't burned, they still tasted like the burned sauce. Plus, the chops were tough and the flavour didn't really soak beyond the exterior of the meat. I recognise that making these with a grill would keep the sauce from burning, but it wouldn't fix the toughness. Clearly, though, not everyone shares my opinion, so if you love pork chops and own a grill, then this recipe might be right up your alley. And, like I said, your house will smell like a Hawaiian paradise while you're cooking these.

The verdict:

2 spoons out of five. We managed to eat the ones we made, but only because there was nothing else in the house and we've already survived worse in my unending quest to tweak impossible recipes into possible ones in my own kitchen.

The recipe:

Lime-Glazed Pork Chops

the directions:

Preheat oven to 176C/350F.
Mix together all ingredients except pork chops, whisking well to blend.
Baste the chops, then place them in a searing hot pan for 5 minutes on each side.
Baste again, then move them to the oven for another 10 minutes.
Chops are done when there is no pink in the middle.

the ingredients:

1/3 c dark corn syrup (or 1:1 black treacle and golden syrup if you live over here)
1/3 c lime juice from 2-3 limes
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp lime zest, grated
¼ tsp ground cloves
2-4 1-inch thick pork chops

June 15, 2015

Jiffy Tuna Supper

June 15, 2015/ Blair Cowan

In Scotland, you live a little bit like bears, all year round. In the winter, you hibernate (because it gets dark at 3pm), and in the summer, you stay up and bask in the sunshine all day (because it stays light until 11pm and gets light again by 3:30am). And so every winter, we (along with everyone else in this country) find ourselves eating dinner at 5:45pm, the minute we get home from work, because our bodies assume it must be at least 9pm, based on how long it's been dark. And in the summer, we routinely find ourselves awake (and convinced we've slept til noon) at 5am, and not eating dinner until we notice our stomachs growling and realise, with surprise, that it is, in fact, 10:45pm.

This is exactly what happened to us last week when I made this meal.

It was a normal Thursday night, we were hanging out doing Thursday night stuff, when suddenly I realised that it was 10pm and, though still light, far beyond a reasonable dinner hour. So I did what any self-respecting American living in Britain would do and got a box of 'Macaroni Cheese' out of the pantry. Over here, there is (bewilderingly) no 'and' in the title-- and while I am the first to admit when Scottish phrases surpass American ones in cuteness (wee), awesomeness (higgledy-piggledy), or weirdness (peely-wally), I think that in the case of macaroni, the 'and' is merited. Without it, I get nervous that it's the noodles that are cheese-flavoured, not the sauce, and that would just be terrible.

Also, Kraft and Velveeta aren't available in Scotland (which is why, when I spent a month in Miami in January, I ate macaroni and cheese approximately three times a week)-- there's just one terrible generic brand that comes with powder cheese that's not very cheesy so if you make it yourself you have to add real cheese in order to make it taste anything besides just yellow. The package, however, is tartan, so at least there's that. But the fact remains: it's a little embarrassing how I keep thinking that the weirdest-sounding recipes in the box will be absolutely disgusting, and then, inevitably, Judson and I end up happily munching away on our dinner... and this latest one is no exception. Neither of us are picky (we're both quite the opposite), and while we've definitely found recipes we wouldn't make again (looking at you, chicken-flavoured-chicken), there haven't really been any that we couldn't at least muddle our way through. (Judson's good humour in this regard is probably a giant reason that this blog still exists, as he's been stuck eating an awful lot of dishes we never would have otherwise tried since I started this project.) I thought for sure this recipe would change our near-perfect track record, though-- its core ingredient, after all, being a box of macaroni and cheese-- but I'll be damned if this wasn't a perfectly fine late-night meal on a cool summer night when we could hear a storm blowing in as we cooked.

Your eggs should be cooked more than these ones, it just turns out I'm SO good at eggs I can't make a dry one even when I'm trying.

Eleanor, who cut corners on dinners but never desserts, would be proud, I think, by our ability to make do with only the barest of pantry essentials on this recipe-- you're almost sure to have everything needed for this recipe already in your pantry, and whatever you're missing is, of course, completely omittable (except for the mac n' cheese, which is kind of the backbone of this recipe-- for better or worse). This is the kind of meal I imagine Eleanor making for her kids after a long day of work at the middle school where she made her career, and while it may not be healthy, it's got a vegetable, a protein, and a starch in it and sometimes, that kind of stodge is all you can ask for.