Tales from the Kitchen

Kitchen table discussions with recipes and ideas for shopping on a budget, cooking for a family, meal planning.

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Happily married mother of eight, Arab-American knitwear designer who also dabbles in other crafts and loves to cook.

Thursday, October 05, 2006

Two Meals for the Price of One

If anyone out there still checks this blog, here is something new for you!

Tuesday night, we had smothered pork chops, mashed squash and scalloped potatoes.

I started the scalloped potatoes first, because they take the longest. I pulled out the fake mandoline I have, and sliced eight Yukon Golds. I layered them in a 9" X 13" pan, salting and peppering each layer. Then, I took two cups of heavy cream, tossed in two cloves of garlic, minced and a teaspoon of thyme. Tossed that in the microwave for something like two minutes, and poured it all over the potatoes, spreading the garlic around. Put the pan in a preheated oven, 375, and baked for an hour.

For the chops:

I sliced two onions and sweated them in olive oil, peeled, cored and sliced a pear and tossed that in as well, stirred it all around until they were soft and starting to brown, and put them on a plate. I then browned six one inch thick pork rib chops in the oil, after salting and peppering them generously (these were all natural, non-injected chops, fed with no medications in their feed), turning once. I had to do this in two batches, because even my largest pan wouldn't hold six chops in one layer at once. I put the first three chops on the plate with the onion and pear, when the second batch was browned on both sides, I added the onion and pear back, and stirred it all around a bit to cook them down some more. Then, I grabbed the apple cider vinegar and put a couple splashes in, half a cup? One cup? Something like that. Sprinkled the whole thing with two teaspoons of dried thyme and brought it all to a boil. Covered and reduced heat, cooked for about 15-20 minutes.

For the squash, I took two sweet dumpling squash, poked them all over with my knife, and put them in the microwave for 20 minutes. Pulled them out, and while burning my fingers, peeled them and removed the seeds, put all the flesh in a bowl with about four tablespoons of butter and some salt and mashed them up.

This provided dinner Tuesday and lunch yesterday.

Last night, after our mechanic fixed the starter on our car, we had him over for dinner. The beans and rice I think I've posted here before, let me know if I haven't and you want to know how I did it. I took a 1 1/2 pound flank steak (bought in the cheap meats section) and rubbed it with a tablespoon of chipotle powder and a teaspoon of kosher salt. We were going to grill it, but I ended up broiling it, something like 15 minutes. Sliced it thinly across the grain, served with the beans and rice in flour tortillas, with lettuce, sour cream and salsa. This went over really well.

For dessert I made the lemon pudding cakes from Fine Cooking, except I increased the lemon zest by quite a bit. Those were so good, we will definitely be making them again.

Next up, the recipes and food descriptions from my last post.

1 Comments:

Blogger About us said...

Well, just in case you are still checking, I read your recipe for scalloped potatoes and plan to try it. Thanks!

Sunday, March 28, 2010 6:57:00 PM  

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