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

French Pear Tart

I have Dorie Greenspan's Baking: From My Home to Yours book and I love it. It's a great book to leaf through and look at the pictures. It contains a ton of easy to follow recipes from simple recipes to more elaborate ones, suitable to bring to a party.

I decided that it was time to make the french pear tart. The french pear tart contains a lot of almonds and the two are very complementary together. It turned out that this tart was really simple to make and one I'd make again. It contains three components:

1. Pate Sablee
2. Frangipine
3. Pears

The pate sablee is the crust and it has lots of ground almonds mixed into it. This was very simple to make, especially since I had my trusty food processor to do all of the heavy lifting for me. I particularly liked working with the pate sablee because I didn't need to roll it out. I simply made the dough and pressed it in the pan with my hands -- what could be easier?

Frangipine is the almond filling for the tart. It contains an egg, ground almonds, and butter. It's sinful but very delicious. Again, my food processor mixed everything all up in a jiffy.

It is March and I didn't think that pears were in season so that put me in a bit of a dilemma: how do I get nice, juicy, sweet pears at this time of year? Luckily for me, Dorie recommends that you use canned pears instead of fresh pears. Canned pears? Really? I don't like canned fruit but I was willing to give it a shot. If the author endorses it for the recipe then it must be adequate.

I made this in two days rather than a single day since I've got a day job and I must do something to pay the bills. ^_^ The first night I blanched the almonds and ground them up. It was my first time blanching almonds before and it was really easy to do. I forgot to take a picture of all the discarded hulls but it was quite a large amount. I had Ming to help me with the almonds and we blanched >1cup of almonds in 15 minutes. I made the pate sablee and the frangipine and put them in the refrigerator. The second day I assembled everything and put it in the oven.

As you can see, my results didn't look wonderful (I need to work on my pear arranging skills) but it was very tasty. This recipe is a keeper and I'll be making it again in the future


Side view of the tart


Close up

Goose Fat

I received a jar of goose fat over the holidays and didn't open it until yesterday morning. I have heard lots of good things about it and know that people rave about french fries cooked in duck fat. I was eager to the goose fat out on my breakfast potatoes. I cubed 3 potatoes and cooked them in a skillet for breakfast. I didn't know how much goose fat to use so I used a mere 2 tablespoons in a 16" skillet. The potatoes came out wonderful but I didn't notice any difference in flavor from cooking them in the goose fat compared to when I cook them in normal vegetable oil. When I put the goose fat into the skillet I immediately smelled a bit of the gaminess that goose has but that smell quickly dissipated.

At the end of the meal I was still left with the question: What is the big deal with goose/duck fat? I still hadn't been able to reproduce the sinful aromas of what makes some people's hearts beat faster and eyes close in bliss. I think I must continue to experiment with using this animal by-product to see what all the fuss is about. Preliminary testing seems to indicate that when used in small amounts, goose fat performs the exact same way as normal vegetable (normally peanut or olive oil in my kitchen) oils. The next test will have to include much more fat (much as my weight cringes at that thought) to see if that will help to produce lovely, intoxicating aromas.