Pan-Seared Pork Chops With Sauteed Collard Greens

Here's a great recipe for a fall evening. Classic pork chops served with sauteed collard greens.

To add some additional flavor and to help prevent things from sticking, we use small cubes of pork fat, called "Lardons." There's nothing fancy about this. I trim the fat off of a ham (leaving some of the meat attached), place the cubes in a bag and toss them in the freezer for future use. 

This recipe also uses some rendered bacon fat, which is the perfect thing to do with those drippings after cooking bacon. Naturally, this is not the healthiest of ingredients, but thankfully you aren't using a whole lot. For a pound of collard greens, you are using maybe 1 tablespoon of bacon fat and perhaps 1/8 of a cup of lardons. If you wanted to make this even healthier, you could substitute all of that with two tablespoons of olive oil, but you wouldn't get that great bacon flavor in the final mix, so your mileage may vary. 

The chops are seasoned with "essence," which is a recipe that I stole from Emeril Lagasse. The ingredients are listed below. I made a batch of this stuff a while ago and am still using it. If you don't have the time to make the essense, use your favorite seasoning you have on hand. (Mom used to always just use seasoned salt, which works just fine.) I also added a little dried rosemary just because I love cooking with rosemary.

Ingredients:

2 pork tenderloin chops, bone on

1/8th cup of lardons

1 tbs bacon fat

1 bunch (about 1 lb) Collard Greens

1 green apple, sliced into thin chunks

1/2 onion, sliced or diced

1 clove of garlic, minced

1/2 cup of apple cider vinegar

2 tsp of "essence"

Essence recipe:

2 1/2 tablespoons paprika

2 tablespoons salt
2 tablespoons garlic powder
1 tablespoon black pepper
1 tablespoon onion powder
1 tablespoon cayenne pepper
1 tablespoon dried oregano
1 tablespoon dried thyme

First the prep work:

Wash the collards and trim the stems off (save them for the sautee). 

Then stack the greens together, roll them into a cigar shape and slice them into 1/4' strips. This is known as a Chiffonade. 

This allows the greens to cook evenly and in much less time than just chopping them randomly. 

Dice up the collard green stems, slice the apple into thin chunks, dice up 1/2 an onion and mince up 1 clove of garlic and have this ready to go. 

Now we're ready to get the fire going. 

Add the lardons and the bacon fat to a medium sized pan under low heat until they render out to a liquid.

Once that's done, turn the pan up to medium-high heat, lay the chops in and season with the essence or your favorite seasoning. 

You want to get a nice sear on both sides. These chops were fairly thin, so a minute or two is all you're going to need.

Once they're cooked, set the chops aside to rest.

Add the chopped apples, onions and collard green stems and saute them until they just start to cook. 

Once the mixture has cooked a little, add the vinegar to help deglaze the pan.

Deglazing helps to lift the browned bits that were cooked onto the pan while cooking the pork chops. Think of these as flavor pockets! Normally deglazing is done with wine, but in this recipe, apple cider vinegar does the trick. 

Add the minced garlic at this point.

Once things have started to simmer again, add the collards.

By this time, the house should begin to fill with the sensational smell of apple cider vinegar and garlic. Pure bliss, as far as I'm concerned.

Cook the collards till they have reduced somewhat, aprox 5 minutes, then add the chops back on top of the greens and cover, cooking for another 2-3 minutes. You're just warming the meat back up at this point and the cover keeps everything moist and delicious.

Then you're ready to serve. 

Enjoy!

"Healthy" Pumpkin Cupcakes

As part of my continuing series on using pumpkin in the Fall (and because I still have several pounds of puree to get out of my freezer),  I grabbed a recipe from Dani Stout over at her blog Ancestral Nutrition and gave a go at her "pumpkin cupcakes with maple cream cheese frosting." The recipe is actually pretty simple and it uses almond flour and honey  - so it's technically healthy - or at least healthier than using flour and sugar.

I learned a couple of valuable lessons with this recipe:

The first, is that my friend's new Ninja Blender is sharp. REALLY sharp. Like, gushing-blood-from-the-laceration-inflicted-by-catching-the-blender-blade-as-it-falls-out-of-the-food-processor-attachment-thus-saving-severe-injury-to-your-girlfriend's-foot kinda sharp. Holy Hell! I didn't even feel the blade sink into my hand. A thorough washing of the equipment (and my hand) and a large bandage and I was back in business.

The second is that if you intend to use cream cheese for a frosting, dont freeze it. Freezing creates crystals inside the cheese that then gives you a completely different texture to the frosting. No matter how much whisking you do, its going to come out watery and curdled.

Here's the recipe:

For the muffin:
1 cup pumpkin puree
2 cups almond flour

1/2 cup honey 

2 eggs 

1/2 cup milk 

2 tbsp cinnamon 

1 tsp baking soda 

For the frosting:

1 1/2 cups cream cheese

1/2 cup butter (one stick) 

1/2 cup maple syrup (always use the good stuff. Its not cheap, but its pure)

First, preheat the oven to 375...

I had almond meal, which is much coarser than flour, but blending it for a few minutes makes it a much finer texture. 

Add all the other ingredients to the flour and blend until its a smooth batter.
Pour the batter into lined muffin tins and place them in the oven for about 25 minutes - or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the muffin comes out clean.
For the frosting, whip the cream cheese, butter and maple syrup together, toss it in a zip-lock bag, cut a tiny corner off of the bag and pipe the cream onto the cooled muffins. 

The finished product. It stuck quite a bit to the paper lining. A bit more than I like, but at least it left me with a muffin tin that I didn't need to spend a lot of time cleaning. 

The texture was perfect and the taste was amazing.

For an added touch, Dani mentioned that you can dust the top of the icing with coconut sugar to make it more fancy, but I promise you that they will not be sitting long enough to dust them with sugar. 

Enjoy!

Easy Pumpkin Soup

Summer's harsh grip has loosened on the city of the violet crown and Fall is quietly tapping on our shoulders with a welcomed smile. And as the seasons transition, my culinary curiosity shifts to the idealic icon of Fall: the humble pumpkin.

Most people dont think about it, but the US grows over 1.5 billion pounds of pumpkin every year, making it one of the most popular of all cultivated crops in the country. Its also the biggest exporter of pumpkins internationally.

The word pumpkin originates from the word pepon (πέπων), which is Greek for “large melon". The French adapted this word to pompon, which the British changed to pumpion and later American colonists changed that to the word we use today, "pumpkin". -Wikipedia

Right around Christmas, most grocery stores cant wait to get rid of their stock, so last year we picked up a couple of standard jack-o-lantern type pumpkins at next to nothing. We spent the evening drinking wine, making jack-O-lanterns and listening to my yearly mix of Halloween music (Screamin Jay Hawkins, Danny Elfman, etc.). And of course, I toasted up the seeds in a sweet praline style to munch on. (I'll post that recipe soon.)

The next day, it was time to slaughter our new holiday friends. The end result: several pounds of wonderfully roasted pumpkin puree that lasted us completely through the winter season, with still a lot left over.

So this Fall, Expect a good assortment of ways to cook with pumpkin.  And why not? It's inexpensive, flavorful, and a great source of Vitamin A, which helps keep your immune system working good, great for the eyes, and even helps prevent the formation of urinary stones. And did I mention it's dirt cheap?

So here's a recipe for a simple pumpkin soup that is perfect for those cool Fall nights This is just enough for two people, but its easy to scale this up to whatever number of portions you need:

3 cups chicken stock
2 cups pumpkin puree
1/2 cup of chopped onion
4/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp of fresh thyme
1 clove of garlic
2-5 whole black pepercorns.
1/3 cup half and half
1/2 tsp chopped parsley

This recipe is pretty simple:

Toss everything but the parsley into a pot and bring it to a boil.
Reduce it to simmer for 30 minutes.

At the end of the first simmer, take the soup and run it through a blender until its completely smooth. 

A word of warning: Tossing the soup into a blender all at once could cause the mix to explode all over your kitchen. A better way is to run in small batches, one at a time until all the soup is blended.

Don't cover the blender completely.
Instead pull out that center fill top and place a towel lightly over the opening to allow the steam to escape. 

Pour the blended soup into a separate bowl until the whole batch has been blended, then pour everything back into the pot, and simmer it again for another 30 minutes.

You're looking for a fairly thick soup at this point. 

When ready, stir in 1/3 of a cup of half-and-half, toss a pinch of parsley in the center (or any decorative way you feel like garnishing) and serve.

I like to have a nice chunk of some good French bread to go along with it. That, along with a glass of wine and you have a great way to welcome in the cooler Fall weather.



Enjoy!