Oh boy, yet another pork chops recipe. 7-11: Piquant Pork Chops tries to stand out by boasting a fruity, spicy take on the standard pork-chop-with-pan-sauce entries that have already been covered at length throughout this project.
I think it’s a bit hyperbolic to insist that just adding a “new” spice or sauce to pork chops radically changes it as a dish, but I suppose that for some people it can be a big deal to experience new things outside of the regular old tried-and-true.
Here’s yet another white bread recipe for you–Simply Delicious has already covered this territory pretty well with 17-6: Best Ever White Bread and 17-10: Poppy Seed Bread. 17-6: Honey White Bread is probably more comparable to traditional white store-bought bread (think Wonder Bread) than the other entries thanks to the sweetness added by the honey.🍯
I’d consider this more of a “breakfast” bread than a sandwich bread, but YMMV.
Over the years I’ve made plenty of steaks, but I don’t have a lot of experience cooking flank steaks. Jamie grew up eating carne asada–but on the East Coast, we were eating Steak-Ums sandwiches. Not quite the same, but it got the job done. 8-29: Marinated Flank Steaks was a fun opportunity to cook this recipe and get familiar with cooking a different cut of beef that I’m used to.
I have some experience with marinades so this dish wasn’t too difficult for me to attempt. It is ranked Fairly Easy after all.
Playing a bit of catch-up here since unscheduled interruptions, other non-food-related projects, and massive amounts of holiday baking have put me far behind in terms of keeping up with posts. I had started working on a Bread Series, starting with 18-1: Basic Yeast Dough I which I published back in October. Covering 20-12: Basic Rolls was intended to play off of that concept, giving you an easy recipe to utilize the lessons presented in both that post and its follow-up, 18-2: Basic Yeast Dough II.
Quick review: the last three chapters of Simply Delicious are part of its Cooking School, intended to review basic techniques, ingredients, and recipes with which all aspiring chefs should be familiar. I’ve covered a few bits and bobs out of those last few chapters, but much of it still remains untapped.
Spareribs are one of my favorite cuts of pork. I have fond childhood memories of my mother’s spareribs recipe that she got from her mother. I know it sounds cliché, using a recipe handed down from your mother’s mother, but I still use that recipe to this day. 7-16: Orange-Glazed Spareribs is not quite my grandmother’s recipe, but it gets the job done.
The set dressing in the example photo is amazing. The mug full of beer and the basket full of oranges give an incredible ambiance to the scene. My photography is more utilitarian and I don’t spend nearly as much time setting up a beautiful background, mostly because I’m starving by the time I’ve got my plate ready to snap the final plate photo.
Scones have a lot of different methods of preparation, usually depending on varying geographical interpretations. There’s even different pronunciations of the word “scone”–some rhyme it with “tone”, while others rhyme it with “gone.”
Simply Delicious‘ take, 17-11: Scones, seems to most closely adhere to the British version of scones in that they make theirs into round cakes, score them, and then break them apart into triangle shapes after baking. The North American versions tend to be individually-sized, round, and more often than not closely resemble what we refer to as biscuits.
One of my first memorable experiences with scones were at an 18th birthday tea party I attended in the last few months of senior year of high school–we had just come back from a Spring Break trip to England & Ireland, and I came to the tea party prepared with white gloves and pinkies up. They had scones with clotted cream & jam, finger sandwiches, and lots of flowery, delicate pots of tea. ☕️
Wouldn’t have been my choice for an 18th birthday party (I spent a good portion of mine in my freshman dorm room hungover from the Halloween extravaganza the night before), but it was definitely unique.
It’s a new year, and it’s also been a long time since I’ve covered any of the Cooking School portion of the back of the Simply Delicious cookbook. One of the featured topics is 18-3: Good Kitchen Knives, essential tools for any cook. I’ve had a lot of terrible knives, and I’ve got a long way to go until I make jaws drop with my knife collection, but I’ve got a few that are not too shabby. 🔪
I’m going to try NOT to make this a “look at all my cool knives” kind-of-a-thing, because honestly, my collection isn’t all that Internet-impressive–I don’t have a ton of trendy Japanese pieces or massive cleavers, because I just don’t cook that way too often. Plus, I feel about knives like I feel about cars–give me a broken-in cheap old workhorse over a shiny speedster you’re afraid to scratch up any day of the week. 🚙
I definitely did NOT eat a lot of lamb or veal growing up, but cooking through these recipes has given me the opportunity to try out some different dishes these days. On a recent Costco trip we found lamb chops on sale, so I decided to use them for 10-17: Lamb Chops with Mozzarella.
This seems like a strange trend that Simply Delicious is perpetuating–7-2: Pork Chops with Tomatoes is essentially the same idea except with pork, Cheddar cheese, tomatoes, and green beans. Take meat, stack a slice of cheese and random fridge/pantry items on it, call it a recipe. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I mentioned in 18-17: Cooking Glossary I (the first installment of this mini-series) that I’ll be mixing in Cooking School entries from the last three chapters of Simply Delicious along with the regular recipe/photo entries that I usually do.
Here in 18-18: Cooking Glossary IIa, we find the second page of the glossary that I introduced to you previously. There’s one more page after this one, which you can find at 18-18b: Cooking Glossary IIb. I split the second entry to limit the amount of links/pics/content in one post.
Follow the jump for links to recipes I’ve covered that will help you practice each and every one of these terms & techniques! If I haven’t covered the term yet in one of these recipes, I’ll be sure to update it when I do!
7-28: Pork Chops with Rosemary is a pretty simple pork chop recipe that’s good for a quick dinner. We buy the big packs of chops from Costco, so we always have to come up with different ways to prepare them.
Along with the abundance of pork, we’ve been growing and drying our own rosemary–it’s WAY more potent and flavorful than the packaged stuff from the market. If you have to choose, go with the fresh over the dried–it’ll taste so much better.