Pork Chops in Zesty Barbecue Sauce

Its not exactly baking but I managed to get some cooking in.  I promise baking will go up this week! Its tradition for Valentine’s week and we’re nearing the last week of that.

Saturday night, I gave the choice of what to eat and my boyfriend chose pork chops and he described a sauce that he wanted so I flipped through my cookbooks and found this one in Looneyspoons.  Don’t you just love that book? Because I do! I haven’t had one failed recipe from it yet and thats pretty amazing! 🙂

I promised already in yesterday post that I’d post up the recipe so in case you missed that post, here’s how it turned out!

Pork Chops in Zesty Barbecue Sauce

Of course, it was more of an adaptation from Looneyspoons recipe since this is meant to be done on a grill but I simmered it instead but I used her way to make the sauce. I’ll put their recipe but include the modifications afterwards.

Sauce Ingredients for 4 pork loin chops (I upped some of the sauce portions as I made 6)

1/2 cup ketchup
2 tbsp freshly squeeze lemon juice
2 tbsp molasses
2 tbsp minced shallots
1 1/4 tsp chili powder
1 tsp minced garlic
1 tsp grated lemon zest
1/2 tsp dried rosemary
1/4 tsp freshly ground black pepper

How to do this is pretty straight forward.  I first combined all the sauce ingredients in a bowl and mixed it thoroughly.  Afterwards, I put some olive oil in the pan and then sizzled the pork chops a bit first on both sides before putting in the sauce and lowering the heat to let it simmer with the cover on.

Now for changes.  There are only two small ones.  One was that I removed the chili powder as I can’t take spicy so I don’t own it at home.  Second is that I replaced dried rosemary with Herbes de Provence.  I love using that to replace some types of herbs because it adds a beautiful taste.

I had no idea how this would turn out during the cooking process but we loved it.  Definitely a keeper! It makes a thicker sauce and a bit in the sweet and sour flavor.  I think the lemon really brings out the zesty factor (as expected).  Its just really awesome: simple, easy and relatively quick; my type of cooking. Love it! 🙂