It may sound odd, but I have been trying to eat a pork chop for dinner for a month and a half. It all started when we met friends at Park and Orchard, an ordinary looking restaurant with an extraordinary wine list in East Rutherford NJ. I had been there a few times before and once had ordered the pork chops which were everything a pork chop should be—juicy, thick and not too done. I’m not dainty, but downing mounds of meat at one sitting is not my thing. On that first visit, I ate one chop and took the other home where it morphed into two more meals—a pork, roasted tomato and arugula sandwich and, a couple of days later, ended up in little cubes in a bowl of Pho from the neighborhood Vietnamese place, New Tahn Hoai, bumping up against diced tofu and shredded Napa cabbage.
Back to Park and Orchard which, on that night, was out of pork chops. The next attempt was at a place here in town, which decided it was a good idea to assault a pair of pork chops with a laundry list of unrelated ingredients. I passed. Last night we went with good friends to a waterfront restaurant in Weehawken which specialized in fish, but I held out a slim hope that next to the obligatory steak and chicken offerings on the menu there would be listed a pork chop of some description. I was wrong. I probably wouldn’t have ordered it anyway.
So today I figured screw it, I would stop being pork-dependent and actually cook a chop for myself. Joe, having grown up Cuban and therefore pork-infused, doesn’t usually eat pork chops, but I was jonezing bad enough to take the train to The Chelsea Market where Dixon Farmstand provides the best of all things meat. In what looks like my slow steady march toward vegetarianism, I don’t eat much meat anymore. So when I do it has to be good, as in grass-fed, pastured, from-a-small-farm good.
Before I left for Dixon I knew there was half a bunch of broccoli rabe and some garlic in the drawer—a mandatory pairing for home-cooked pork chops, so I was set there. I pulled a turkey burger from the freezer for Joe. (Several shakes of tamari, half a bunch of minced scallions and a big spoon of mustard per pound of ground turkey; use ground leg/thigh of turkey if you can find it and resist the urge to add bread crumbs because the mixture seems loose. It isn’t.) Dixon delivered the goods in the form of a single, ¾ pound bone-in pork chop in my favorite cut—the porcine equivalent of a beef T-bone.
Back home, I realized the broccoli rabe was in the drawer a little longer and more wilted than I thought. It looked sort of sad and dejected, like it hadn’t been asked to go to the broccoli rabe Senior Prom, which I remedied by lopping off the last couple inches of thick stem and swishing it around in a salad spinner full of cold water. By the time I extracted the pork chop from the butcher paper, rubbed it generously with salt and pepper and a little olive oil, and whacked, then chopped, a few cloves of garlic, the broccoli rabe looked perkier. I let it drain.
I prepped the broccoli rabe and put a largish cast iron pan on the stove with a good glug of olive oil. In went the garlic and a healthy pinch of crushed red pepper. Before the garlic got too brown, I added the broccoli rabe and let it cook down. Normally, I would cover it, lower the heat all the way and let it steam/sweat until it was nice and tender. There is a time for chewy greens but pork chop night is not one of them. But I was just setting myself up for dinner, so I just let it go until the water was cooked off and the rabe was about half cooked. That did it for now.
To get ready for dinner I pulled the chop from the fridge to let it warm up a little and heated the oven to 400° F. A smaller cast iron pan, just large enough to hold the chop comfortably got a splash of oil and a seat of honor over a medium-high flame. I took a good 5 or 6 minutes to brown the chop on both sides, then lifted it from the pan and swirled the half-cooked broccoli rabe around in all the goop in the pan before wiggling the chop into its green nest and putting the whole pan in the oven to finish up. This idea of working with a pan on the stove top, then in the oven, is one of those restaurant everyday-isms that really does adapt well to the home kitchen. Just be sure the pan is completely ovenproof and that you’ll be able to lift it from the oven when it is blazing hot and full. In this case, it is the perfect way to finish cooking the broccoli rabe and the pork. After about 10 minutes I pulled the pan from the oven and was ready for dins. As for the turkey burger, Joe shelved it in favor of a Greek-ish salad, which he somehow pulled together from the far reaches of the refrigerator. While by his own admission, Joe isn’t much of a cook, he does share my knack for making something out of seemingly nothing. And that’s fine with me. That turkey burger gives us a leg up on dinner tomorrow.