Slow Cooker Smothered Pork Chops

On days that I have multiple cooking and baking projects on the agenda, making our dinner in the slow cooker frees up time and makes life a little easier. 

We hadn't had pork chops for a bit, so I decided to try this recipe (courtesy of Center Cut Cook). I mean how can you go wrong with ingredients including bacon, onions, chicken stock, Worcestershire sauce, to just name a few? The answer: you can't.

After crisping up some bacon in a pan, it got scooped out and set aside. Seasoned pork chops went into the same pan and browned. They then went into the slow cooker.

Next, onions, salt and a bit of water were tossed into the pan the chops were browned in and cooked until the onions were translucent. A bit of garlic was added for about 30 seconds, then the whole mixture was poured over the chops.

Again in the same pan, I added chicken stock, Worcestershire sauce, and brown sugar. All that was brought up to a boil, then poured into the slow cooker.

This all cooked for 7 hours on low. When the pork chops were done, I removed them from the slow cooker and tented them with some foil. 

The liquid in the slow cooker was strained into a saucepan and the solids were put into a blender, along with a cup of the liquid from the saucepan. The solids were blended until smooth and returned to the saucepan.

A corn starch slurry was made and poured into the pan and cooked over medium high heat until the sauce was thick and bubbly. A touch of vinegar was added, along with the reserved bacon.

We were ready to eat.

The pork chops were moist and fall apart tender. The sauce? Oh my goodness, the sauce. I would be happy with a bowl of that with some crusty bread. It was awesome. The Worcestershire sauce offered a great back note and the splash of cider vinegar brought a brightness to the onions. 

There's no doubt this dish will make more than one appearance on our table.

Cassoulet of White Beans with Braised Pork, Sausage, and Chicken Confit

I recently needed and wanted to spend some quality bonding time with my kitchen. Oh sure, I've been cooking and baking a variety of dishes over the prior days, but I wanted to find a recipe that I could sink my teeth into -- both literally and figuratively.

This cassoulet recipe (courtesy of Fine Cooking) was exactly what I was looking for -- lots of prep, lots of ingredients, lots of steps.

The first step was to make the confit in advance of preparing the cassoulet. Now you will notice the recipe calls for a duck confit. I opted to work with chicken, as ducks, while available, can be quite a spendy product in Belize.

The process of making a confit is dead simple to do. Basically, you are covering your protein with a slew of olive oil and letting it bake, low and slow. This is the recipe I used and this is how it looked after about two hours in the oven:

I covered the confit and stuck in the fridge until the day came to make the cassoulet.

As I noted earlier, this recipe has lots of prep. Besides chopping and dicing, there's also a good deal of oven and stove time required. The day I decided to make this recipe happen, a couple of events made my day of cooking even more of a challenge. But more on this in a minute.

The first thing I did was cut up the pork shoulder into about 2-inch pieces. After tossing the meat with some olive oil and salt/pepper, I went to heat the saute pan. But guess what? We had ran out of butane. Fortunately, our supplier is located at the end of our lane and about 35-40 minutes later, I was cooking with gas and browning the pork. 

With that step out of the way, wine was added to the pan and reduced. Next came broth, garlic, and rosemary.

The pot was then covered and left to cook on low heat for about 1 hour.

While the pork simmered away, I moved on to making the veggies and tomato sauce. This step entailed browning up some diced bacon in some of the infused olive oil from the chicken confit. When the fat was rendered, the bacon was put into a bowl. More infused oil was added and diced carrots were cooked up until just tender and golden brown around the edges. The carrots went into the same bowl as the bacon. Another glug of infused oil went into the pan and onions were added. Those were cooked until soft and caramelized. Then the onions went into the bowl with the bacon and carrots.

Onward to the tomato sauce. In the same pan that the veggies were cooked in, another glug of oil went in and some minced garlic, which cooked for 20-30 seconds. Chopped tomatoes were added, along with some salt, and about 5 minutes later it reached a chunky consistency.

By this point, you can probably guess that the kitchen sink was filling up fairly fast with dirty pots, pans, and utensils. While I had a little break in the action, I figured I would tackle the stuff in the sink. Small problem. We had no water pressure. Sigh. The dishes were left as they were and I continued with the recipe. 

Now I was now coming into the home stretch. Sausages were browned up, set aside to cool, then cut into quarters.

While the sausages were cooling, I combined cooked beans with the veggie/bacon mixture and put it into a Dutch oven.

The sausage was put on top of the bean mixture, then a layer of pork shoulder, then the meat from the chicken confit.* The broth that the pork was cooked in was poured in, along with the bean cooking liquid.

The cassoulet was baked in a pre-heated 350-degree oven, uncovered, for 45 minutes.

During this baking time, I combined more of the infused olive oil with some breadcrumbs and grated cheese. When time was up for the cassoulet, I sprinkled the breadcrumb mixture over top and the pot was put back in the oven for another 45 minutes.

By this point, our water pressure returned and David kindly started on the now even bigger pile of dirty pots and pans.

After the cassoulet hit the 45 minute cooking mark, I removed it from the oven and let it rest for another 45 minutes.

It was then time to eat.

Both of us thought this was excellent. All of elements came shining through and worked together beautifully. However I wouldn't be so heavy handed with the breadcrumbs next time. We also agreed that it could use more liquid. As we had more than enough for leftovers, I added some homemade chicken stock, which did the trick.

So while there a couple of glitches during the process of making this meal, the time and effort were certainly worth it. This recipe will definitely enter into my rotation for a future kitchen bonding day.

* I used about 1 1/2 leg/thighs from the confit. Also, I halved the entire recipe, because I was only cooking for the two of us. If you make the full recipe, trust that you will have enough to feed an army.

Ricotta Stuffed Pork Chops

During a recent reorganization of our freezer, I came across a container of ricotta that really needed to be used sooner, rather than later. Casting about for what to do with it, I remembered this pork chop recipe (courtesy of Fine Cooking).

First step: Saute some red onions, garlic, roasted pepper, rosemary, red pepper flakes. When done, the mixture was transferred to a bowl.

Second step: when cooled the onion mixture was stirred into the ricotta cheese.

Third step: I made a slit in the pork chops and spooned in some of the ricotta mixture.

Fourth step: The chops were then seasoned with salt and pepper and given a quick sear on each side/

Aren't these just gorgeous?

Fifth step: The chops were transferred to a pre-heated 325 degree oven and left to roast for about 10 - 12 minutes.

Sixth step: Plate it up!

Okay so on the high side, the ricotta filling was very tasty and would definitely like to use it again in other applications (maybe a ravioli filling?). On down side, I screwed up the cook time for the chops, so they weren't as tender and juicy as I would have liked. Man you take your eye off the prize for one second and BAM! your chops are toast. Well they weren't that bad, but you know what I mean. Sigh.

Pork Adobo

Yesterday was really hot and humid, meaning it was the perfect day to have my oven on for three and half hours to make this recipe (Food Republic). 

Seriously, making a recipe like this in the heat either shows how much I love to cook or that I'm a lunatic. Probably a bit of both.

Anyway, let's chat about the dry rub for this beauty:

That's a 5 1/2 pound pork shoulder with lovely fat.

The dry rub contains paprika, salt, garlic, cayenne, black pepper, and brown sugar.

I rubbed this all over the pork...

...then wrapped the meat in plastic and put it in the fridge for an hour.

When time was up, the pork was placed in a roasting pan and popped into a pre-heated 450 degree oven for 30 minutes.

After 30 minutes, I pulled the pan from the oven and dropped the heat to 325 degrees.

Beer and water were then poured over the roast, and a slew of garlic cloves were added to the pan. I covered the pan with aluminium foil and put it back in the oven to roast away for two hours.

It was during this time that the house started to smell absolutely amazing.

After two hours was up, I pulled the pan from the oven, removed the foil temporarily, and added cider vinegar, brown sugar black pepper and soy sauce.

The foil was put back on the pan and popped back into the oven for another hour and a half.

This is what the roast looked like when it was finished its oven time:

I put the roast on a rack and, when it was cool enough to handle, shredded the meat, and put it in with the pan juices.

Of course, several samples were taste tested along the way.

I let the pork sit in the juice for a few hours, then portioned out what would be our dinner. 

Ladies and gentlemen, we are talking about some serious flavors here. The dry rub permeates the meat, which was uber juicy. And the soy sauce and vinegar elements offer a great yin/yang to all the spices. 

This was totally worth a hot kitchen on a hot day.