how to make a pork chops dinner
ingredients:
4 pork chops boned or boneless, no one cares
salt
pepper
2 golden delicious apples, or other brand
the end of a bottle of maple syrup, so you can kick it and get a new one
dried cranberries, maybe 1/4 cup
more butter than you care to admit, perhaps 3/4 stick, salted
cinnamon
sugar
green beans, buy more than you think you’ll need
some type of oil, maybe vegetable or canola, but probably not olive
nuts, optional
the first step in cooking this dinner for 4 persons is to plug your portable mp3 device into a loud, portable, all-weather radio, press play. feel free to sing along.
clean the green beans, cut off the ends. core the apples. people say to peel them, too, but why? don’t peel them. chop the cored apple into roughly 2 cm cubes, but don’t get hung up on making them cubular. set green beans in a colander, apples in a cereal bowl. pour end of maple syrup bottle onto apples, add granulated sugar as needed, mix with dried cranberries and some cinnamon shakes. set aside.
set oven to 175 F. put salted water on to boil.
put some oil in pan. salt and pepper pork chops. when oil is hot, cook two chops at a time, maybe 3 minutes per side. if you’re me, you’ll freak out, worry that the chops are not cooked all the way through, panic, pour some water in the pan, causing oil splatter, cover the pan and create a steam pan for an additional minute or so. take pork chops out of the pan and place them in a baking dish that you’ve had sitting in the warm oven. repeat until all your pork chops are in the dish. (please don’t do the steam thing, it’s probably a bad idea.)
melt a lot of butter in the frying pan, maybe half a stick. add the apple mix and cook it down for awhile. at this point the water is probably boiling, so put the green beans in it. when the apples are soft, pull them out, put them in the warm baking dish with the pork chops, and reduce the liquid in the frying pan ‘til it gets “thicker.” pour that on top of pork chops and apples. add nuts if you want.
drain green beans, return to pot with butter, salt, pepper.
et.
