Cooking
Pork Chops in Mushroom Sauce
Ingredients
- Lean pork chops
- 2 cans condensed cream of mushroom soup (low fat/low sodium)
- 1 can ready-to-serve cream of mushroom soup
- onion
- mushrooms
- garlic
- salt and pepper
Turn on the slow cooker to its highest setting. Slice some mushrooms; I like to use a combination of cremeni and portobello. Dice a medium onion and two or three cloves of garlic.
In a large frying pan, fry sliced mushrooms in a little vegetable oil. Put the mushrooms into the slow cooker and pour in one can of the condensed soup. Next, fry the onions with some salt and pepper. Add the remainder of the mushrooms, if any, and the diced garlic. Add this mixture to the slow cooker, along with another can of condensed soup.
Brown the pork chops, making sure that all sides are cooked lightly. The meat doesn’t have to be cooked through, because it will spend several hours in the slow cooker; you just want the meat to stay tender and juicy.
Put the meat into the slow cooker, and pour the can of ready-to-eat soup over top. Let simmer for at least three hours, then reduce heat until ready to serve.
Baked eggs in avocado
In an attempt to efficiently use all of the fruits and vegetables that come in the organics bin every Thursday, I whipped up some Sunday morning breakfast using the rapidly ripening avocado that arrived last week. This is definitely not a complicated recipe (it’s pretty much just putting two foods near each other while they cook), but it certainly was delicious. The textures of the egg and the avocado really complimented one another, and I felt better about cooking the egg in a fatty avocado than I would about cooking it in butter or with bacon fat.
I ate mine with a knife and fork, exactly the way it appears in the picture, while Brandon ate his mashed up onto a bagel.
To make baked eggs in avocado:
- Preheat the oven to 350 F.
- Halve an avocado and remove the pit. The egg is much bigger than half an avocado pit, so scoop up some extra space with a spoon. You can eat the bit you scoop out, which is a pretty excellent bonus to being the chef.
- Put the two avocado halves into a baking dish.
- Crack two eggs into the hollows of the avocado halves.
- Add salt and pepper.
- Bake in the oven for about 15 minutes, or until the eggs look cooked to your liking. I left them in a little longer, and they came out something like medium-hard.
Nutritional Info (each half):
238 calories
19.5 g fat
9.5 g carb
6.5 g fibre
8 g protein
Jamie Oliver’s mini shell pasta with a creamy smoked bacon and pea sauce
Tonight, we started cooking from the new cookbook: Jamie’s Food Revolution. We started with a pasta recipe, the Mini Shell Pasta with a Creamy Smoked Bacon and Pea Sauce.
We followed the directions pretty closely, with the notable exception that we used maple bacon, rather than plain smoked bacon or prosciutto. The bacon didn’t get as crisped up as I would normally like it, so I think next time I’d fry the bacon on its own, rather than adding the oil and butter to the pan first, and proceed from there. The results were incredible… we knew deep down that we weren’t eating anything that could be remotely considered ‘healthy’, but it felt really good to cook something so decadent from scratch!
I made sure to stake a claim on enough to eat for lunch tomorrow. I’m still full, and I’m already looking forward to it!
