The Color of Summer

Taste a rainbow...

Pork Products - Meal #2 - Pork Chopssss and Apple Sauce

Alton Brown has become the guru of cooking in our kitchen. If you have not heard of AB, you should look him up or get his cook book - I'm Just Here for the Food.

Tonight we used his breaded pork chop recipe with one minor revision - instead of crushed salt and vinegar chips, we used Italian bread crumbs. If we'd read the recipe first, we would SO have used the crushed chips as that sounds simply fabulous. My beau cooked the chops to perfection - tender, white, and juicy. For sides we had steamed broccoli and wild long grain rice with mushrooms. The photo below shows the exact thickness of the pork chops we ate, but ours were not quite as oddly shaped as this one.



ps. we've been eating the smoked bacon periodically for breakfast and damn if it isn't the best bacon EVER! One difference we've noticed from store bought bacon is there is less grease left in the pan. This is a good sign for our health, yay!, but bad for my beau because he has been using bacon grease as lighter fluid for his smokey joe and other charcoal grill. I believe this bacon grease chimney lighter candle is also an AB idea - the man is simply BRILLIANT!

Perfect Summer Time Meal

Sweet Italian Sausage on the Grill with Fried Onions





Minus the bun...and minus the ketchup, this is what was for dinner last night. Nothing to making the meal either.

Slice open any sausage of your choice, place face down on a hot grill, and cook 'til done. Onions and peppers can be sliced, wrapped in tin foil and also thrown on the grill to cook (takes much less time to cook than the sausage). Or they can be pan fried. Once lightly browned, veggies are done! Finish cooking sausage and add onions, mustard, and horse radish to top (or as dippers on the side). We added some cooked spinach and macaroni and cheese for sides.

Perfect summer meal...

A Little Pork Goes A Long Way

For the next 6 months my beau and I receive 10 lbs of meat from a local farm, The Turkey Farm. We signed up for a meat share and I have never felt better about eating meat!!

The bounty this month included:

sweet Italian sausage
smoked bacon
2lbs of ground pork
pork chops (the biggest and prettiest chops I've EVER seen)
a chicken breast (one which is the size of TWO!)


Hopefully I'm not forgetting anything...We also signed up for a veggie share through the partner farm to this one, Stillman's Farm. The Stillman's are a family who run both farms, one team ofparents the other a daughter and her husband. Last year we had a veggie share with Red Fire Farm but wanted to try a new one. My beau worked on Red Fire once upon a time and his recollection of the quality of their produce was not a match for produce we received...Needless to say as the demand for CSAs grows and turns into a craze, the capacity of existing farms is strained and the quality is the first thing to suffer. Plus, I've heard from some farmers that the best produce sold is found at farmers markets. Why? Because prices are higher there and these people are choosing what to buy. Us poor saps who buy into the CSA are giving our support and trust before we see the produce AND we're locked in for the season anyway. Customer satisfaction should be of concern...but right back to where we started - with the growing demand for CSAs and fresh produce, farmers have a customer right in line to fill my empty spot if I decide to leave.

Stay tuned for posts on what to do when you get 10 lbs of pork products!