Pork chops

The number one meat in this house is chicken.  Second is beef.  Third is fish.  And fourth is pork.  I don't know why, but for some reason I didn't eat a lot of pork growing up.  Well, bacon.  But not chops or loin or any of the meatier cuts.  So I don't think of "pork" when I'm considering what to make for dinner.  In fact, the only reason I served it tonight is because I bought it on sale, froze it whole in the family-sized pack, and found it when I was digging around my deep freezer, looking for "something different". 

A 3-pound pack may not seem like a lot, but these are sirloin chops: No bone, very little fat, so these 3 pounds of meat are almost all meat. There were five "steaks" in this pack (technically a sirloin chop - but that's what they're talking about when they say "pork steaks") and these five totaled 2.96 pounds, so we're talking roughly 9.5 ounce steaks.  An "adult serving" steak in a restaurant is usually 7 ounces, with "larger" steaks being 9 ounces.  So these are large pork steaks.  I had to thaw them in my sink since the styrofoam pack was too big for my microwave.

To cook them, I put the five steaks in a glass cake pan, topped with a half a stick of butter, sliced thinly and placed on top, then salt, pepper, garlic, and generic "italian seasoning".  I put the pan in the oven set at 400 degrees for 20 minutes.  I did not "pre-heat" the oven so some of that 20 minutes was the oven heating up, but I felt this would help thaw the steaks as I'm sure they were still frozen in the middle.  When the timer went, I reset the timer for an additional 10 minutes, and began work on the sides: baked potatoes and green peas.

The potatoes I did first, baked in the microwave.  To do this, scrub the outside of the potatoes, to remove dirt, then put them still wet on a microwave-safe plate, and nuke for 4-5 minutes.  Then flip them over, re-wet if necessary, and nuke for another 4-5 minutes.  Baked potatoes are done when a fork goes smoothly into the center of the potato.  Or you can just cut the biggest one open down the middle and make sure it's baked.  I baked 5 because they should all be roughly the same size, and the kids won't eat a large baked potato, so I did a small one for each kid and 2 small ones for me.

Then, when they were done, I cooked the peas, also in the microwave, with just a little butter and no seasonings.  Sometimes I put dill on my peas, or garlic salt, but tonight I just used butter.  These only take 3 minutes on high.  You don't want them turning to mush.

By now, the timer on the oven had beeped twice, alerting me that the chops were done, but I left them in the oven.  They looked done but I figured they weren't going to burn in an additional 3 minutes, and I didn't want them getting cold while the peas were cooking.  I was right, by the way.  They did not burn.

As I said, these were large pork steaks, and my two bigger kids split one, while my youngest just a bit off of mine (as in, I had an "adult sized" 7-ounce steak, and he had about a third of that, taking my "extra" 2.5 ounces) to go with his potato and peas.  The kids had milk to drink.  And out of the "family pack" I had 3 left-over steaks for another night. I ended up not eating the extra potato so I put one steak, along with the extra peas, on the potato's plate and wrapping with saran wrap for a pre-set dinner one of these nights.  The other two steaks I wrapped in tin foil, to serve another night.

For dessert we ate rhubarb crisp, made with rhubarb picked last week.  I've modified my mother's recipe, and this is how I make it now:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Place 4 cups of diced rhubarb in an ungreased 8x8 brownie pan.

In a separate bowl, mix 1 and a half cups of sugar, 1/2 teaspoon of salt, 3/4 cups flour, 3/4 cups raw oats, and 1 tsp of cinnamon.  In a microwave-safe bowl, melt 1/2 cup of margarine, and mix that into the flour mixture to make crumbs.

Cover the rhubarb with the crumb mixture and bake the pan 40-50 minutes, until the crumb topping begins to brown.

When the timer sounds after 40 minutes, I remove the pan from the oven and push the topping down into the rhubarb juices with the flat end of the spoon, then put it back in, as the original recipe says, until the topping begins to brown.

Also, my mother's original recip omits the oats and has the margarine at only 1/3 cup.  But I've modified it to taste, and I like it this way.  Rhubarb itself is a sour plant, and is only likeable in this house with large quantities of sugar.  However, if you've got a member of your household that loves sour, you can cut the sugar in half and it comes out tasting like a green granny smith apple pie.

 

The crisp should cool to at least "slightly warm" before you eat it so you don't burn your tongue,

 because it's deliciousness is such that, once it is tasted,

you will burn your tongue rather than stop eating.

Hot Rhubarb:  Turning ordinary people into Homer Simpson.

Tonight's total: (actually slightly less than) half a pack of pork steaks: $2.93.  Half a bag of  (not on sale when I bought them, so I had to pay full price - grumble, grumble)  peas: $1.45.  Potatoes: (3 dollars a bag, I figured I used about 1/4 of the bag) $0.75, and rhubarb crisp: (rhubarb was free but "crumb topping" cost an indeterminable amount, I'm just gonna round up and guess $2.  Certainly less than $2).  Total then is $7.13.  Far less than $10 and still have 3 steaks to use up. 

Awesomesauce.