Simple Dinner: Baked Pork Chops and Stir Fried Sinqua

I was tired from a long day of work and I decided that a simple dinner was going to be on the menu tonight. My freezer looks like a meat locker since we tend to buy our meat in bulk and freeze it so that we always have ready access to some kind of meat, regardless of the day of the week. A meat locker freezer also allows us to buy the meat without worrying about when we will have time to cook it up for a meal.

I had a nice pack of pork chops in the freezer and decided that pork chops is one of the easiest and quickest items to make for dinner. To accompany the pork chops we had a nice sin qua melon waiting to be eaten.

Sin qua is a Chinese vegetable and has a spongy texture when eaten. It has ridges on it and the skin is very tough so it must be thoroughly removed. I believe it is part of the cucumber family. More info

I have a fondness for any dish prepared in the HK-Western fashion. When you go to HK-style cafes it generally means the dishes are chinese dishes but with a decidedly western influence. One such example is the macaroni noodle soup. All Chinese restaurants offer a noodle soup. A noodle soup is some long kind of noodle (generally a long, slender noodle) in a rich broth. The HK cafe will serve this noodle soup with elbow maraconi, which blends the western culture with classic Cantonese favorites.

One such dish that is always on the menu at a HK-style cafe is baked porkchop. This dish generally contains a piece of deep fried pork chop covered in a tomato sauce gravy and baked with (optionally) melted cheese. I altered the recipe a bit to be more health conscious and skipped the cheese and deep frying.

warning: I never measure anything when I cook Chinese food so all quantities are approximations and should be altered to suit your own tastes

Baked Pork Chop with Tomato Sauce
Marinade:
salt
pepper
garlic powder
paprika

Tomato Sauce
3 cans of tomato sauce
2 T oyster sauce
5 shallots (or 1/2 an onion), chopped
3 T ketchup
2 t soy sauce
4 T sugar
pinch of white pepper

6 pork chops (ones which have lots of nice marbeling)

Mix the ingredients together for the marinade and pour on top of the pork chops. Let the pork chops marinate for at least 30 minutes. Lightly pan fry each pork chop just to get a nice sear on each side. Do not cook the pork chop all the way through. Once all pork chops are seared and removed from the pan, add the shallots into the pan. Stir fry the shallots until they are translucent. Add the oyster sauce, ketchup, soy sauce, and white pepper and stir fry for 2 minutes. Add the tomato sauce and sugar to the skillet and stir until the sauce thickens and begins to bubble. Add the pork chops back into the skillet, making sure the sauce completely covers each pork chop. Place the skillet into a 325 degree oven for 30 minutes.


HK Baked Pork Chop and Stir Fried Sin Qua