Recipe post!

[labellementeuse]

I didn't take photos of this or time it, but I was really pleased with how the meal I made last night turned out, so imma record it here in the hopes that I repeat it later.


Self-Saucing Pork Chops

Pork loin chops
Honey
Red wine vinegar
1 apple, grated

3 regular onions peeled and quartered, or a bunch of wee pickling onions, peeled
Castor sugar
50g butter
Stock (optional)

Stuff to serve it with (I HIGHLY recommend garlic mashed potatoes. Plus a salad to fake healthy.)

1. Marinade pork chops in a little red wine vinegar (maybe a tablespoon), a drizzle of honey, and the grated apple.

2. Meanwhile simmer the onions in lightly salted water for ten minutes. Drain the onions, reserving the water if you're not going to use stock.

3. Melt the butter in a large saucepan. Add the onions and turn to coat. Sprinkle over around a tablespoon of castor sugar and add the pork chops, along with the honey and apple. Cover with stock or the onion water (around a cup, a cup and a half), cover the pork and onions with baking paper, and simmer until the liquid is almost all gone (depending on how thick your pork is, you may need to remove it at some stage and then add the onions when the liquid is very reduced) - this should take around 20 minutes, i.e. enough time to boil and mash some potatoes.

4. Serve on top of potatoes all drizzly and delicious. They're called self-saucing potatoes because, duh! They come with built-in apple sauce. :P

Relevant to everyone's interests, today's/yesterday's XKCD was laughable in kind of the opposite way to the way it usually makes me laugh. I mean, really?

ALSO: I wrote fic! It is Nikita fic! Only one of you is in that fandom and she beta-read it for me (<3) ... but hey. Outrunning the Bear is Jaden-centric and rated, IDK, PG for swears. Spoilers through 1x09.

Up next: catch up on Nikita and White Collar. Mmmm television.

Comments

[meigui]

that xkcd is exactly how cooking usually goes for me. I can make about three dishes without stuff producing mysterious smoke or something, and that's it.

[labellementeuse]

Awh, man, I mean, I guess, but it pissed me off because there's no actual learning to cook step in his flowchart. His problem is expecting he'll just be able to do it, straight away, which is, you know ... dumb. If you know that you're probably going to only make one meal, pick a simple recipe and buy ingredients for that and make it one time! Next week, pick two recipes, the week after, pick three ... IDK, I just feel like it's a loop he's creating himself. And not being able to cook is OK if you're a student or you can pay someone to do it for you, but it is kind of a life skill and it's not a mysterious one, you know?

[meigui]

Hahaha, well, given, one of the dishes I know how to make is stir-fry, which is pretty modular so it allows for a good degree of variety, but I don't feel right counting it as more than one dish because, well, stir fry is stir fry. It doesn't matter what you put in it, the steps are essentially the same regardless. But idk, what always passed for a "recipe" in my family was something along the lines of, "these are the ingredients, this is what it's supposed to look like, repeat these three or four steps in a loop until it looks right". I can only figure out, like, proper recipes if I can work them out by analogy to something I already know how to do, which is why I've never touched baking; my family never baked anything except, like, whole yams. I seriously didn't know people made pasta dishes by any method except stir-fry until my senior year of high school when I took a cooking class, which was... a little disastrous xD

[caramarie]

I studied that XKCD very carefully, trying and failing to find the funny part. Sigh.

But SPEAKING OF FOOD do you want to come over for lunch sometime? We could even have a picnic if it's nice.

[labellementeuse]

srsly. apparently the experience is common though, IDEFK.

Yeah! I would love to! When's good?

[caramarie]

Any when that is not the weekend is a good when!

[hazel]

I am tagging this recipe because it looks REALLY GOOD and we have everything in it at the moment, so. Also, mashed potato. :D

As for xkcd: your opinion is pretty much the same as my opinion. I do think there's a base level of knowledge required before you can make a lot of stuff - for example, one of my favourite Very Easy things to make is: chop chicken breasts into palm-sized hunks. Wrap in bacon and pin together with toothpicks/chopped-up bits of skewers. Put in oven-proof pan. Smear with pomegranate molasses and crack some pepper over the top. Cook at 180 deg until the chicken is cooked (about 35 mins). I invented this one night out of Shit That Needed Using In My Fridge, plus Stuff That Lived In The Pantry. But in saying that it's really easy, you need to be able to judge--
- the appropriate size for the chicken chunks
- How Much Bacon? (which is obviously a question for the ages)
- how much is a smear of pomegranate molasses?
- how much cracked pepper one should use on an amount of food that is to be cooked for several people, rather than one serving
- et cetera

which is to say, very long-windedly: yeah, the xkcd thing really did miss the "learning" part of learning to cook - but I can see why people who really don't have any kitchen skills give up; it'd be frustrating to put in a lot of mental energy and effort and end up with, IDK, slightly-charred chicken breast, overcooked potatoes, and some limp beans.

(Not that I don't totally produce meals like that some nights. But mental effort, not so much.)