Okay. This one sounds weird. It looks weird too. But you know what? It actually worked out okay. I had some green beans from the CSA box that desperately needed to be used, so here’s what we did with them.
Pork chops + tomatoes + green beans + sliced cheese sounds odd. Book 1, Group 2 (Main Courses), Subgroup 7 (Pork) gives us 7-2: Pork Chops with Tomatoes. I had pasta and salad ready on the stand-by in case this went south, but luckily I didn’t need them.
Almost redundant at this point, but pork and tomatoes were two things that were not consumed in large amounts when I grew up. No chance anyone’s made this before.
All ingredients were pretty much on point, except maybe the cheese could have been thicker? You can never have too much cheese, I suppose.
Chops were boneless & thin-cut, and there were 5 instead of 4. Beans were from the CSA box, and probably a bit wilted at this point, but they turned out pretty delicious.
Trimmed the strings off. That’s a thing you have to do apparently–I was unaware of that in the past. My green bean experiences were usually limited to canned or frozen iterations.
Beans a’cookin. All the rest of my shots of the cooking pork were blurry as hell, so you get to look at lots of beans.
Somewhat blurry picture of pork with tomatoes. The tomatoes were a bit tough, and I would have wanted to cut them into smaller pieces. I didn’t want to mutilate them completely, so I just let them stay big.
And….cheese. It’s definitely a colorful dish, if nothing else.
Into the toaster oven. Toaster ovens are difficult to keep clean. 🙁 Especially when you cook 4-13: Fennel au Gratin in them and it tips slightly as you try to wrestle it out.
The finished product, fresh out of the toaster oven. It’s cheesy, tomatoey pork, with green beans. Works well, even if it seems a bit odd at first.
Plated for dinner. The beans were described as “exquisite”, so take that for what you will. Overall, a surprise success.
Grade: A-
