Cranberry and Apricot Pork Chops

This is a variation on a recipe I've posted in the past: Cranberry Pork Chops.

The reason for the variation is that halfway through making dinner, I discovered I did not have any marmalade left. Oops. I did have apricot jam, however, and I've had success using that with pork before, so I decided to smash two recipes together and hope for an edible result.

It worked!

How to make delicious happen:

4 pork chops

1/2 to 3/4 cup fresh cranberries, halved

Apricot jam, 3-4 tablespoons

Preheat your oven to 350.

Season the pork chops with salt and pepper, then brown them, for about 2 minutes a side, in a pan that can be transferred straight to the oven. I like to use my favorite Le Creuset Braiser for this sort of thing. Sometimes you can find those at Home Goods at a steep discount, and I'm sure other brands are good too, but this one is was a gift from my Mom and it's gorgeous and I try to use it often.

While they're browning up, a small bowlful of halved fresh cranberries with enough apricot jam to hold them all together, which in my experiment, came to about 3 tablespoons.

Once the chops have some color, put a dollop of the cranberry goo on top of each one. Add a few tablespoons of water to the pan (enjoy the sizzle!) and then transfer it to the oven, covered, for about 20 minutes. Check the temperature with a meat thermometer - pork chops come in varied thicknesses and yours may take longer to cook through.

If you've got some liquid left in the pan, move the pork chops to a plate and put the pan back on the stove to boil off and thicken the liquid into a sort of gravy. Add another dollop of the apricot jam if you want it sweet and syrupy. I did, and I loved it!

What's For Dinner - 5-Spice Pork Tenderloin

This is another of my Mom's excellent recipes. It's the most delicious marinade for pork tenderloin that I've encountered yet. Usually, we make it in the oven, but since it's Memorial Day weekend, the start of grilling season, I decided to dust off the old Weber and ask my husband to play Grillmaster.

What you'll need, for two tenderloins:

5 cloves of garlic, minced or squeezed through a press

1 tsp salt

½ tsp ground ginger

3 tbsp soy sauce

4 tbsp honey

1 tsp five-spice*

*Note: I had a hard time finding this, until I realized it's often labeled as "Chinese Five-Spice Powder" and housed in the grocery store's alphabetized spice section accordingly.

First, have fun peeling the silver skin off the tenderloins. I'd offer you a how-to video, but I'm not that talented, and I don't think I have the look the Food Network folks are looking for. Lucky for us, the internet already contains pretty much everything imaginable, and this nice lady will show you how to trim a tenderloin.

Grind garlic, spices, and salt together. I use the back of a spoon to mash the stuff together. Mix your remaining ingredients in a big bowl, then rub the salt and spices into the meat. Massage those tenderloins like they've been working in the yard all day and you're working the knots out for them before they shower, and settle them into the honey and soy sauce bath -  they should be sitting in liquid, but they should not be covered by the liquid. Add more honey and soy sauce if you feel that they don't have enough marinade to soak in. Cover tightly and refrigerate several hours, or overnight if you can manage it. It helps if you can flip the meat in the marinade a few times while it's in the fridge, to make sure all parts get equal soaking.

To cook – fill the bottom of a pan with a half-inch of water, then place fillets on a rack over the water, to steam. Cook for 30 minutes at 350F, turning over once. Mom likes to use a broiler pan for this:

Since I don't have one, I use a regular roasting pan with a rack, and it comes out great. This was the first time I tried grilling the meat, and I followed some instructions from a cooking site that said to use medium heat and cook it for 4 minutes per side, but treat it like it has four sides. So, turn it 90 degrees each time instead of a full flip. Grills and heat distribution will vary, as will the thickness of the tenderloins, so use a meat thermometer. When you see 140 or so, you can pull the meat off the grill and cover it in foil - it will keep cooking for a few minutes and reach the recommended 145.

Here's the result:

Still a little pink in the middle, very tender, with a tasty grilled crust. I'm sorry the quality of my photos tends towards the painfully amateur... it's a good thing I'm not a serious food blogger!

This makes a great dinner with rice and salad, but it also makes a tasty cold appetizer. Just slice it thinner than you would if it was for dinner, and serve it on its own or with crackers. It's spiced garlic pork - I can't imagine anyone waving a hand at it and saying "no thanks, I'll stick with the carrots and ranch dip".

What's for Dinner - Stuffed Pork Chops

I cheated on the use-it-up challenge. I bought pork chops at Costco because I had a coupon, they looked delicious, and it was an incredible price. I also cheated last week when I bought Goldfish crackers, but let's ignore that.

These were the biggest, thickest pork chops I've ever seen. An inch and a half thick! the package was 6.75 pounds, and there were 11 pieces in it, so if you do the pork chop math, it comes out to over half a pound per delicious chop. Are you drooling yet?

I knew exactly what I wanted to do with them. Stuff them! The pork chops I get at the grocery store aren't usually fat enough to stuff, so I was really excited about the wonderful opportunity in my fridge. Thank you, Costco, for making a recipe dream come true.

This recipe isn't really a recipe, because I threw it together and didn't take notes, but you can do the same thing and get a great result, I promise! This is the best kind of recipe, because you don't really need to measure or pay attention.

I cut a pocket in two pork chops and sprinkled the inside and outside with some salt and pepper. I made about a cup of Stovetop stuffing, but with less water than the instructions say, because I figured the pork chop juice would add a lot of squishiness and I didn't want watery stuffing. I crammed as much as I could fit into those pork chops and tried to pinch them closed so it wouldn't fall out. I heated some butter in a pan, rubbed the pork chops with a little ground sage, and dropped them in to brown well on both sides.

I moved the chops to a baking dish and put in a splash of chicken broth to help prevent them from drying out, and I cooked them at 350F for about 30 minutes, until my meat thermometer told me it was safe. Depending how fat your chops are and how long you browned them, your cook time can vary a lot. Use a thermometer, check after 20 minutes, and keep going from there.

When they were done, I put the original pan back on the stove with more butter and whisked in some flour over medium heat. I added chicken broth and simmered and whisked until it looked right to me, then I added some sauteed mushrooms and onions that I pulled out of the freezer (I thawed them first in the microwave).

I am glad that I have nine giant pork chops left, because that means I get to do this again.

What's for Dinner - Pork chops, apples, and onions

Because I still work evenings, I need to get dinner figured out pretty early to avoid having to come up with a plan at midnight. Depending on what I'm making, I'll prep everything in the morning or I'll thaw stuff overnight, leaving me with only the cooking part to do once I get home. I don't mind so much having to cook late at night, but thinking is always a problem after a long day, and I hate having to come home and decide what to feed us.

So I reached into the freezer before shuffling off to bed around 2am, and pulled out two ziplock bags with fleshy pink frozen meat inside so I could leave them in the fridge overnight to thaw. I always buy the boneless, skinless chicken breasts at Costco and freeze them individually for easy portioning later, and that is what I thought was in those bags. I had a plan for a lemon garlic sauteed chicken breast dinner, and I was quite pleased with it. Lesson learned: label freezer food. Seriously. Because examination of the thawed meat at midnight after the following long day at work revealed pork chops. Eight teeny tiny thin pork chops.

Now what? After a moment or two of grumpy pouting because I couldn't make the dinner I wanted to, I threw together a new plan.

I peeled and cut up two apples, put them in a covered bowl with about a quarter cup of apple cider, and put them into the microwave for two minutes so the apples would get soft. Meanwhile, I fried up the pork chops in a pan with some olive oil, salt, and pepper, and put them aside when they were done. Next into the pan went half an onion, sliced really thin, with a bit more oil and a dash of thyme. When they were soft, I put in a small bit of flour and stirred that around for a minute before dumping the apple cider and soft apples in. The pork chops and their juice went back in too, and I stirred it all up and left a lid on it with the heat all the way down for a couple more minutes before I called it ready because I was hungry.


It turned out pretty good. It got the husband's thumbs-up and there were no leftovers, so either we were starving or it was decent. I thought it was a little on the sweet side and I think I'll add some apple cider vinegar if I do this again. I probably should have gotten the pan hotter and done a better job browning the chops so they'd look nicer - this meal wasn't very photogenic!

What's for Dinner - Breaded Sage Pork Chops

I'm sure there are a million wonderful ways to cook pork chops, but they're still sort of a mystery to me, which is why we don't eat them often. Besides the cranberry orange pork chop recipe, I've got nothing to work with. But this week, pork chops were on sale, and they looked pretty good, so I picked up a big family-size package, and then I had to figure something out.

I got a bowl of breadcrumbs ready, and mixed in some salt, pepper, and powdered sage. About half a teaspoon powdered sage in 3/4 cup of breadcrumbs. I salted and peppered the pork chops, both sides. I scrambled an egg in another bowl, then I dunked the pork chops in the egg and pressed them into the breadcrumbs, making sure they were really well coated. I put a mix of oil and butter in a pan and got it really hot, then put the chops in for about 5 minutes a side. They were pretty thick. I used a meat thermometer to check for doneness, because I don't trust timing and I don't like to cut them open. When I took them out of the pan, I added another tablespoon of butter and a couple of shakes of the powdered sage, and then a tablespoon of light cream. I whisked that around until it was frothy and brown and then I topped the chops with it. It didn't give much "gravy" but I didn't want it to - I just wanted a little drizzle, and this was enough.

They were really tasty!

Lessons learned: Sage tastes really good with pork chops. Egg makes breadcrumbs stay on really well. Oil + butter gives a better result than either one by itself.

What's for Dinner - Marinated Pork Tenderloin

Last night I took two pork tenderloins and cut off all the fat and the silver skin, and put them in a freezer-sized ziplock bag with half a bottle of Ken's Honey Teriyaki marinade. Since this is me talking, I couldn't leave well enough alone and I added two sliced garlic cloves to it. I think I made the right decision.

Tonight I got home and put them in the roasting pan, dumping all the marinade in the bag on top of them, and adding a bit of water to the bottom of the pan. I gave them about a half hour at 375, turning them once. When they were done, I took them out, put the roasting pan on the stove, and added about half a cup of water and whisked up all the good bits to make a sort of "au jus" concoction.


I made Pioneer Woman's "Crash Hot Potatoes" as a side and they were fantastic. They've quickly become one of our favorite starchy side dishes. They're whole potatoes, boiled to tenderness and then crushed on a cookie sheet, brushed with oil and herbs, and baked in the oven until they're crispy on top. Incredible.

That was our fancy Valentine's Day dinner - no time to make dessert because I got home from work later than usual, but I got Cadbury mini-eggs as a present tonight so I'm eating those and all is well with the world.

Note: this is also my "thing" for February 14th, because who has time for crafts when love is in the air?

What's for dinner: Cranberry Pork Chops

Pork chops were on sale last week, so I bought a family-size pack and decided I'd figure out a way to make them interesting. Pork chops are my least favorite way to eat pig (that wonderful, magical, bacon-based animal), likely because the pork chops of my childhood were fried up in a pan and plopped on a plate beside some instant mashed potatoes without much fanfare or dress-up. And they're boring like that. why do you think I added enough ketchup to my mashed potatoes to make them pink?

No real recipe, because I pretty much winged it, but if you were making this you'd need:

Some pork chops (mine were boneless, thin)
Butter
Fresh cranberries (roughly chopped, it's fine if they're mostly left whole because cranberries are hard to chop)
Orange marmalade
Ground cloves

I seasoned some chops with salt and pepper and then browned them in a pan with a little butter. Then I moved them to a glass baking dish. I mixed up the cranberries and marmalade in a bowl - I didn't measure anything, I just put as much as I thought I'd need to put a blob of mixture on each chop. It was more cranberry than marmalade, though. The marmalade was mostly to hold the cranberries together. I mixed in a pinch of cloves - not too much because I didn't want that to be the overwhelming flavor.

After spooning a blob of this mixture onto each chop, I baked them in the oven at 325 for about 15-20 minutes (check the temp with a thermometer to know if they're done).



They turned out delicious! The cloves really enhanced the tartness of the cranberry and marmalade. I loved that it wasn't sweet. If the chops were the thick kind, this might have been a good mix to stuff them with after butterflying them. As it was, this was more of a relish on top of the chops, which was nice but maybe it would have been nice as a more liquidy sauce - not sure what I'd have to tweak to make a sauce out of it, though. Possibly heating the mixture in a saucepan with some cranberry or orange juice to thin it out a little... maybe I'll try that next time!