Tuesday, July 15, 2008

More Cooking Tidbits.....Just for PeeJ

I got a call the other day from one of my offspring telling the reason he isn't blogging anymore is because all I ever post is food. Oh he gave me some other excuses too like computer to slow, don't know what to write, and the dog has to go out and take a crap. Yeah you're thinking the same thing I am all poor excuses. So just for him I am doing this post about food, again. I'm not to worried about him seeing it since I am not sure he even knows how to turn a computer on anymore.

Enough about excuses let's get to the food.

I came home from lunch yesterday and decided to marinate some pork chops for dinner. I flipped through one of my cookbooks and there starring me in the face was a recipe for marinading with Hoisin sauce. I knew I had some in the refrigerator so it looked like a good marinade to use. The only problem was I didn't have everything in the recipe. Oh well time to adapt.

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If you ever want to add some great flavor to your meals this is the stuff to use. It is in the chinese or ethnic food section at your local grocery store. It is also a great base for a bbq sauce which is really how I ended up using it on the pork chops.

I mixed the Hoisin Sauce with some ground ginger, garlic, red wine vinegar, salt, pepper and couple of other things I don't remember off the top of my head. Someday I just might decide to write some of these things down as I do them. I put everything in a zip lock bag to marinade until I got home for dinner.

Once I got home for dinner I fired up the grill and got it smoking hot. Next, you guessed it put the pork chops on there for about 6 minutes per side. While the pork chops were cooking I decided to turn the marinade into a sauce. I had read you can do this with marinade as long as you heat it up and boil it for at least 1 minute to kill the bacteria. I added a little vinegar and honey to it too.

Here is the finished product.....
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The asparagus is marinated in sesame seed oil and balsamic vinegar and then after it is cooked topped with parmesean/reggiano cheese and sesame seeds.

Here is another view.....
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A little closer look....
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And one last picture for peej......
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I know peej likes his pork chops so I hope he ends up enjoying this post afterall. They were good.

4 comments:

jporterGOP said...

mmmm, food.

JP said...

I always think the asparagus looks good. I've been craving good asparagus for months now.

carriegel said...

you can't find good potatoes and i can't find good asparagus. maybe if we meet in the middle, like the mitten, we both would be happy.

Anonymous said...

I know I would be if you both did that.