Chef Joel & Jenn: Pork Chops with Mushroom, Onion and Rosemary Cream Sauce
I'm not sure what I did but I somehow have convinced Jenn doing a new recipe every week is a great idea and she is now fully on-board. In fact she seems to be even more excited about the new recipes then I am and wants to invest in more cook books. For Christmas she even bought me a new cookbook called Dinner for Two written by a blogger who's website I frequent quite a bit, TableforTwo. There are a ton of recipes in the book but the first one we stumbled on was the Pork Chops with Mushrooms, Onion and a Rosemary Cream Sauce.
Before we started cooking we had to go pick up some of the ingredients. Over the last six months as we settled in to our new apartment we began to expand out of the normal grocery chains into Trader Joes. In the last couple of weeks we've taken it up another notch and have been getting most if not all of our groceries from Whole Foods. This week marks our first time ever getting 100% of our groceries from Whole Foods. As everyone always jokes, the place is expensive, but the products at least to this point seem worth the money.
We put away the groceries and subsequently spent the next two hours reorganizing the kitchen. This is Jenn's idea of an incredible Sunday afternoon by the way. We did get rid of a lot of old Ikea plates and cups we've had since before we got married. The kitchen area is a lot cleaner and more organized. Jenn was pretty happy with her handy work.
It was now time to start working on the recipe. From the directions it seemed pretty simple. Start off by searing the pork chops for a few minutes on each side. Then take out the pork chops and add in the mushrooms, onions, and garlic and let those cook for a bit. Add wine, let that cook, then add cream, flour and vegetable broth and let that firm into a sauce. Then add back in the pork chops and eureka you have the meal.
Well it didn't work out exactly that way. Our sauce dried up far to much while the pork chops finished cooking. In fact we had to add back in more wine, cream, and vegetable brother to get more of the sauce. I think our mistake was not cooking the pork chops to almost completion at the very beginning. The mushrooms, onions, and garlic got overcooked while we let the pork chops finish cooking. If and when we do this recipe again we will end up using the sous vide to cook the pork chops and then let it cook in the sauce for a minute before serving. The good news is the sauce and pork chops came out beautifully. The flavors were all there it was just in the pan to long. I think if we made this again it might become one of our best homemade meals of all time. The components are there we just need another try at perfecting it.
Because this recipe came from a cookbook I'm not going to post the recipe. If you want it you should buy the book Dinner for Two.
