Food!

18Apr09

Yay! My parents, together with my younger sister, left for New York yesterday.  They’ll be visiting my older sister for a month.  So what do you do when you’re home alone?

Nope, I don’t walk around the house naked (hmm, I think I’ll go try that later).  I COOK MY OWN FOOD!!!  I haven’t had the chance to cook my food in a while, partly because my mom has a rule wherein nobody touches her kitchen aside from her. But now that she’s away, well, Aldwin will cook!(and take pictures of course)

I found this recipe for Rosemary Lamb Chops from the Cooking for Engineers website.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find lamb chops anywhere so I substituted Pork Chops instead.

The recipe consists of equal parts pineapple orange juice.  I have canned pineapple juice so that works.  Orange juice, I was lucky enough that Robinson’s sells freshly squeezed orange juice. Slightly expensive at 150/half liter, but they have a machine that squeezes the oranges right in front of you.  So I guess the price comes with entertainment tax.

The herbs used were Thyme and a bit of Rosemary. The website calls for fresh Rosemary, but I used  dried ones instead since the grocery doesn’t carry fresh ones(I might have been just lazy though).

A bit of garlic and onions, plus the requisite salt and pepper, and voila! I have dinner!

I made some minor mistakes here and there.  Like I should have cooked the pork in low heat first before cranking up the temp to get the sear.  I was cooking it at high heat like the website says, I failed to consider that the chops I was using were thicker.  The outcome was a slightly more brown chops than I would’ve opted for. (Now that I reread the recipe again, it says to slow cook the meat with a bit of the marinade if it’s thicker. DOH!)

Another thing to note is the sauce. The sauce is a reduction of the marinade used for the pork.  Try not to over reduce it since the pineapple juice and the orange juice are both a bit sour, reducing it too much produced an extremely sharp sauce. It kinda worked but I would have wanted it to be a bit less tangy. I added in butter to the sauce. why? well to make it a bit more manly I guess!  Rosemary Pork Chops is such a girly name and nothing butches a dish up like adding butter in it(If only I could have worked out how to add a bit of bacon, I would’ve been happier)

The recipe calls for fresh rosemary.  I agree, picking rosemary out of your dish is a bit tedious. It would have been better to have used fresh rosemary with the stem, so I could have taken it out.

Aside from the pork, I made a bit of mashed potatoes with big potato lumps. The potatoes were absolutely delicious (partly due to half a stick of butter I added into it).  Although it would be better if I had some sour cream to top it.  The sour cream would’ve complimented the pork as well.

Overall I’m quite happy with dinner. It was a bit too much for me( 3 chops when 2 would’ve been enough) but I was able to gobble them all up.  Next time I have to remember to open a window. I can still smell the food.

Verdict:  Next time, I’m eating out.  Clean up’s a bitch.

Filed under: Geek   |  2 Comments