Brazen Pork Chops

As a rule, I tend to cook food that's forgiving of the occasional lapse in attention: A minute or two can be the difference between a medium-rare steak and a piece of charcoal, but as long as it doesn't completely dry out, a braised pot roast or daube, or a slow-cooked bolognese can sit cooking in the oven for an extra hour and nobody will know the difference. The bad news is that you've got to occasionally start dinner at two in the afternoon so that it have time to cook slowly, and technically this dish is no exception. Although the cooking time is significantly shorter than typical, the brining process adds another hour early on.

Brazen Pork Chops
8 pork loin chops, about 1" thick

Brine:
1 quart water
Salt--until said water tastes just salty (probably 2 tbsp)
2 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp whole-grain mustard

Sauce:
4 tbsp whole-grain mustard
4 tbsp sour cream

Secret Ingredient:
Black pepper
Beer

Mix the ingredients for the brine together. Taste before putting the chops into the brine, it should taste approximately like seawater--add water or salt as necessary to achieve this. Place the chops into the brine in a gallon zip bag, refrigerate for an hour.

Preheat oven to 350°

Heat an enameled (or not) cast-iron dutch oven or covered baking pan over medium high heat (should be large enough to hold all the chops when covered--if you don't have a dutch oven, you can use a covered round casserole and sear the chops in a separate pan). Remove chops from bag, sprinkle with black pepper. Sear chops, in batches, a minute per side, being careful not to crowd the pan. Return all chops to dutch oven (or place in casserole), pour in a healthy splash of beer (2-3 oz), and shove into the preheated oven. Let cook for an hour or so.

Before serving, mix together mustard and sour cream. Remove chops from oven, plate, add 1 tbsp of sauce to each chop, and serve. Serves eight dainty eaters or dieters or people who only eat as much as they're supposed to, or four hearty appetites. Plan for four.

7-inch slam

Perhaps I shouldn't plug food blogs that are finer than my own, but after much needling I checked out the 7-inch Slam blog, about records and the recipes to accompany those records. It is with sadness in my heart that I report--

• They update much more requently than I do
• They write longer, more colorful entries than I do
• They post photos of what they're cookin'
• They include a musical selection.

I suggest checkin' it out.

Superbowl Sunday!

Sadly, the Saints were eliminated two weeks ago while I was flying over Canada en route to Hong Kong, so today I'm hoping for a little restitution in the form of Peyton Manning (son of former Saint Archie) and the Colts giving the Bears the beating that they should have received at the hands of the Saints.

The festivities I'm attending today include a chili cookoff. To be perfectly frank, I've never cared for most chili--mostly because I'm not the biggest fan of cumin. It probably has a bad childhood experience involved, like the early years when I thought I disliked pizza because the only thing we ever ate in the pizza department was Food Club Italian Sausage Pizza with whole fennel seeds on it. Fennnel, like cumin, is a weird taste to a young child's palate. Eventually I had pizza that hadn't been rolled in fennel, and chili that didn't have a quarter cup of cumin, and was much happier for it.

I'm trusting that the chili cookoff judges have about the same tolerance for cumin that I do, because I'm bringing this to the party. My wife tells me that it's not really chili, that real chili has beans and chili powder, neither of which she eats. I wonder why someone would add something to a dish simply to make it less delicious and appetizing, but I guess that's her way.

Three-Ingredient Chili

• 1 - Chuck roast, about three lbs
• 1 - 7 oz. can El Pato Salsa De Chili Fresca (yellow can with a duck on it)
• 1 - 7 oz. can Herdez Salsa Casera (white can with tomatoes and onions and peppers on it)

Preheat oven to 275°. Cut roast into 1-inch cubes. Working in batches, sear beef in a skillet over medium-high heat, and transfer to covered baking dish. When all the beef has been seared, pour both cans of salsa over beef, place lid on dish, and shove it in the oven. It'll probably be done in a couple of hours, but you might as well just plan on letting it cook for about five hours so that the collagen and fat will melt away and add complexity, and the meat will fall completely apart.

The chili is fairly spicy: I normally serve it over rice, which some would regard as blasphemy, but you can adjust proportions of chili to rice (and cheese and sour cream and green or purple onions) to make it milder. My wife makes Frito pie out of it, and my father-in-law uses it as a taco filling. If you wanted to work WAY too hard, you could probably make tamales with it, too.

A variation on this recipe yields the filling for a debris po-boy, but that's another story for another time.