Cooking with Michael - Part Ew.

On the menu this evening was a tried and true childhood mainstay: pork chops slow cooked in vegetable soup, with rice and steamed broccoli on the side.

My track record with food is sorry at best (though I did just recently kick the ass of a Valentine's day lasagna), so I thoroughly follow all instructions when I'm aiming at edible. And when a recipe is non-specific or tells me to use a setting I don't have, I ask for help. In all other areas of life I plug things in, turn them on, and try to make them go. It's only cooking that gives me pause and has me calling epicurean tech support.

While making the pork chops I found myself in just such a situation: My extremely brief recipe called for cooking the chops on low for 90 minutes. My little electric skillet goes from off to warm to 200 and then on up from there - low was not an option. So I called my sister who used to whip up this very dish on this very skillet and asked her what low meant. She suggested a little under 200.

With the pork chops bubbling away I started work on the wild rice, then after Flannery got home, on the broccoli. Part way through readying the broccoli to be steamed I heard the rice making popping noises so I took it off the heat to find that it was slightly undercooked on top and burnt on the bottom. Luckily it was not so undercooked as to be inedible, and I didn't want to make the bottom of my pot more permanently scarred with carbon build up than it already was. This a marked improvement, however, over my usual rice: burnt on the bottom, pudding on top. (This is also how one might describe me if I spent too much time outside on a sunny day in shorts and a long sleeve shirt.)

Anyhow, Flannery was home, the rice was finished (if not totally done), and it was time for dinner. I made a big show of dishing up the meal: Packing the rice down in the bowl and comparing it to building a good foundation for one's dinner house. Then I stabbed a pork chop and moved to set the meat walls on the rice foundation, planning later to add the broccoli roof and the vegetable soup chimney. Alas, the slump in the housing market had infiltrated my dinner. The solid caramelized armor off pork and soup juice had joined everything in the skillet into one cohesive unit.

Flannery maintains that it was fine if you ate the top of the meat, but the fact that one has to approach the meat from one direction and stop before getting to the other side is a little disheartening. The cats, however, think caramelized vegetable pork armor is delicious and found it very frustrating that I wouldn't let them put their heads into my bowl.

At least somebody enjoyed it, stupid food.