Dinner: Sweet and Sour Pork Chops

Teamwork, my friends! Our dinners are starting to really bring out a nice little team going on here.  I do the whole marinating and making sauces thing and he cooks it.  I don’t even want to attempt for the fear that I’d probably get it all burnt. This past weekend, we wanted to eat pork chops. These sounded really good and we had most of the ingredients so we decided to give it a little twist in a much lazier way than the already easy recipe here.

Sweet and Sour Pork Chops

Inspired by this pin: http://damndelicious.net/2015/01/31/easy-pork-chops-with-sweet-and-sour-glaze/

• Ingredients are the same as the link, except the butter
• Instead of baking in oven, we cooked it in a pan.  Sauce was pre-mixed and marinated the pork chops in it before cooking.

I really like sweet and sour dishes.  Usually, sour means like adding pineapple to give it an extra kick or lemon.  You get what I’m saying? This recipe is a little different.  It uses balsamic vinegar.  We don’t usually cook with it.  Its available in our house but we just never know what to do with it. So, this was a nice way to experiment.  I’m not going to lie…we should’ve marinated it a little more. Like overnight.  But I’m a spontaneous cook and I just bought the pork chops that day for groceries because we had raided our house of any meat.

Enough of this rambling, this dish is great.  I don’t even think it needs to be in the oven.  Its why I changed the title from the recipe that inspired since the sauce is not a glaze.  I do recommend this.  If you do try this out in the oven, do tell me how it turns out. I just don’t like doing a whole lot of steps for cooking.  Sauce, meat, cook, done.  That works for me especially when we have to cook vegetables or whatever side dishes.  Oh yeah, we also tried out a little fries recipe that Zoe had recommended except we used it on sweet potatoes 😉 And they were so good, even if they should’ve been in the oven for a little longer to get it crispier.

What do you think? Do you like sweet and sour sauces? How do you like to make pork chops?

Stir-Fried Pork with Vegetables and Pineapple Chunks

In the previous post, I had promised to post up the second part of my Chinese New Year dinner and here it is.  I went into my Looneyspoons cook book and did a recipe that I’ve been planning to do for a while.  I love cooking with pineapples.  Since I already had chicken on the menu, I went ahead to make stir fried pork tenderloin with vegetable and pineapple chunks and its paired with sweet and sour sauce.  Doesn’t that sound delicious?

Here’s how it turned out:

Ingredients:

2 tsp sesame oil

1 1/4 lbs pork tenderloin, cut into cubes or strips

2 tsp grated gingerroot

1 tsp minced garlic

1 1/2 cups each chopped red pepper and sliced carrots

1 cup chopped onions

398mL pineapple

1/4 cup each ketchup and rice vinegar

3 tbsp brown sugar

2 tbsp (reduce sodium) soy sauce

1 tbsp cornstarch

2 cups white rice

Directions:

1. Heat oil in a large wok over medium-high heat.  Add pork, gingerroot and garlic.  Cook and stir for 6 to 7 minutes, until pork is cooked through and begins to brown.  Remove pork from wok and keep warm.  Add green pepper, carrots and onions to wok.  Cook and stir for about 5 minutes, or until vegetables are tender.

2. Meanwhile, prepare sauce.  In a small bowl, combine ketchup, vinegar, brown sugar, soy sauce, cornstarch. Add sauce to vegetables in wok, along with cooked pork and pineapple chunks.  Cook until sauce is bubbly and has thickened, and pork and pineapple are heated through.  Serve over white rice.

The recipe is inspired from Looneyspoons. The one up there is how I did it because I did make a few changes to the original. They used peanut oil instead of sesame oil.  Also, green bell peppers instead of red peppers, and canned pineapples where they could use a bit of the pineapple juice to add to the sauce.  The sauce had chili powder but I don’t eat that so I took it out. The last thing is that you should match it with rice but they recommend to use brown rice or quinoa.  That is pretty much all that I modified.

Finally, to the actual results! This was awesome tasting.  I’m serious, these two ladies over at Looneyspoons have some amazing skills.  All their recipes that I’ve tried have been pretty great.

The best reward of cooking was to see my boyfriend give me the approving reaction that he liked it.  And he did for the complete meal and I enjoyed it a lot too.  Even have some leftovers for lunch!

Do you cook with pineapples or other fruits for meals? Any ingredient combinations you like in particular?