Lydia is fond of the show Chef at Home.
It's a show on Food Network Canada about a chef named Michael Smith who cooks a meal at home for his family. While getting ready to run some errands yesterday I was watching the show and he was making pork chops stuffed with apples, bread and sausage. It looked very good and actually almost manageable, though we didn't stick around for the entire show so I never got to see how it turned out.
It turns out that watching the full episode of a cooking show is kind of important if you try to go out and without doing any research make yourself the same thing that the television chef was making. For starters I did not realize that the pork chops would end up topped with an apple/mustard pan sauce and since I had no intention of ever making the meal I did not remember that apple juice was required. I did remember that the recipe called for onions, but since the onion was invented and breed by Josef Mengele [wp] I wisely decided that I did not need that Nazi vegetable anywhere my meal.
The real proper recipe can be found on Chef Michael Smith's website [cms].
But who cares what a proper chef might do?
You're much better off listening to the advice of someone who watched half an episode on the making of apple stuffed pork chops and then went off on his own with his wealth of experience making Kraft Dinner and pouring milk on breakfast cereals.
I began by browning the sausages in a pan, and then once I was pretty sure that I wasn't going to get any diseases from them being uncooked I added in the apples.
After cooking the mixture until the apples were mushy I added four slices of toast that I had cut up into small bits and then cooked all of that until the bread had absorbed all the water and moisture from the pan. Prior to this I was supposed to add apple juice but my fridge is currently stocked with about 173 litres of orange juice so we have no apple juice. I was also supposed to add onions to this mixture but again... Nazis.
Once the bread had done its job and absorbed everything it was time to cut a pocket into the side of the pork chops. This pocket was where I was now going to stuff the mixture of apples, sausages and bread. It turns out that I had way more stuffing than I could fit inside the two pork chops that I had bought, so unless you're particularly adept at stuffing things into meat then I'd maybe cut back the amount of stuffing.
This is as far as I watched in the episode so at this point I had to refer to the website to see what to do next since I've never cooked pork chops. Following the directions I pan seared them on each side for three minutes, added salt and pepper and then left them to cook in a pan on low heat with the lid on for another five minutes.
Now it's true that Lydia would totally tell me I made something good, just to avoid hurting my feelings. She hates it when I weep especially in front of the cats. So her judgment is certainly not to be trusted. I mean she clearly loves me, a fact I discovered when I saw our wedding photos and realized that I looked a lot like a man trying to smuggle a family of Berliners through Checkpoint Charlie by hiding them in my suit.
"No, no kind East German security man, there's nothing odd about me, I'm just ginormous."
Which probably has something to do with eating things like this.
As Tracy Jordan says, "Meat is the new bread."
