Asian-Inspired Baked Pork Chops

eat. Robin and Ziggy and I are back in Hilo again—yay! Because our last stay here was rudely interrupted by discovery of The Cancer, we decided it was high time to make up our lost Hawai‘ian months. Here are the cocktails we had on our front porch on 11/11/11 (aka Nigel Tufnel Day).


The dish in this post is a good one for a dinner party, since you can shove it in the oven and pretty much forget about it until it’s time to eat. For 4 chops, you’ll need a pound or so of fruit—plums, peaches, pears, apples, whatever you can find that time of year. (This being Hawai‘i in November, I settled for a large Asian pear and some frozen peach slices.) In addition, the recipe calls for honey, Chinese five-spice powder, ginger, garlic, a red chile, lemon juice, soy sauce, and black pepper.


I didn’t have any five-spice powder on hand, but I did have Tandoori seasoning. A quick check on the internet showed that they were somewhat similar, so I used the Tandoori powder, which turned out to be quite tasty.

Finely chop the ginger, garlic, and chile:


Then mix together the honey, five-spice (or Tandoori seasoning), ginger, garlic, chile, lemon or lime juice, soy sauce, and black pepper.


Lay the pork chops in a greased baking dish and spread the fruit around and over the chops. Then pour the sauce on top, making sure some gets underneath the chops.


Bake uncovered at 375°F. After about 40 minutes the dish will look like this:


Turn the chops over, and continue cooking until the liquid has thickened to a nice gravy consistency and the meat and fruit has browned.

I was worried the meat would be tough—a common problem with pork chops—but there was enough liquid during most of the baking that they actually braised, and were fine. If you don’t have enough liquid after about 15 minutes of baking to almost cover the chops (the fruit and pork will expel lots of liquid), you should probably either add some more liquid (water or stock), or cover the pan with foil. If you use foil, take it off for the last 15 minutes so the dish can brown.

Mine took between an hour and a hour and a half (I wasn’t paying exact attention to the time), but when I took them out they looked like this:

it’s those damn fluorescent lights
that make everything look so yellow

As sides, I had steamed rice, and stir-fried bok choy—white and green:


Chop the bok choy coarsely, and separate the stem parts from the greens:


Fry the stems in sesame oil over high heat in a wok or large skillet. When almost done, stir in some oyster, or other Chinese stir-fry sauce.


Turn off the heat and mix in the greens, allowing them to wilt. Season with soy sauce, if necessary.

Here’s the meal, plated up:

an ice cream scoop makes the rice look pretty

食飯 (sihk faahn, i.e., “eat!” in Cantonese)


Ingredient List (for 4 pork chops)
(this is adapted from the recipe from Pure Simple Cooking, by Diana Henry)

1 lb. plums, pears, apricots, and/or apples (sliced or quartered)
5 T honey
1 t Chinese five-spice (or Tandoori) powder
1-2 T chopped ginger
1-2 T chopped garlic
1 small red chile
juice of one lemon or lime
1 T soy sauce
black pepper to taste
oil to grease the baking dish

Dulce de Leche

eat. I have a Brazilian friend, Gaby, who told me her family has always made dulce de leche—that Latin American caramel sauce—by simply putting cans of sweetened condensed milk into the pot along with the black beans, and letting them all cook together for several hours.

“What about the danger of exploding cans?” I asked her.

“I’ve never seen that happen,” she assured me.

So when my day to host our French conversation group fell on the birthday of our Argentinean member, I decided to make a dessert in her honor using this almost unbearably sweet sauce—a dulce de leche cake. And I would try the boil-the-cans technique.

I read on line that you should boil the cans in a heavy Dutch oven with the lid cracked, which struck me as a good idea. After all, it was always possible that mine would be the first exploding cans that Gaby had encountered, and a cast iron pot and lid would be sure to protect my kitchen, and anyone in it at the time, from flying shards of metal should this occur.

Even though I didn’t need that much dulce de leche, I decided to make two cans. It wouldn’t take any more energy to boil two, and then I’d have some for later use. (It keeps quite well in the fridge.)


Remove the paper from the cans, and then cover them completely with cold water in a large pot:


Put a lid on the pot, slightly cracked to allow the steam to escape, and bring the water to a boil. Then turn it down to a simmer, and cook it for two to four hours. The longer it goes, the darker and thicker it will get. Make sure you check to pot periodically and add water as needed to keep the cans covered. If you don’t, you could well be the first one with an exploding can. I split the difference and simmered mine for a little over three hours.

Take the cans out of the water and let them cool before opening. Here is what mine looked like:

as you can see, it’s pretty thick—like a thick frosting

For comparison, here’s what sweetened condensed milk looks like when it hasn’t been boiled:


I won’t repeat the recipe for my cake in this post, as you can read it here. The secret to this amazingly-moist cake is that after it’s baked, you let it cool, poke it with a bunch of holes, and then pour in a combination of canned milk, sweetened condensed milk, and cream. (I omitted the cream, figuring it was going to be plenty moist and plenty rich without it, and I dare say the cake did not suffer a whit.)

I will show you photos of the last steps in making the cake. Here it is, with all the holes I made with a knife (they’ll be covered with dulce de leche, so they won’t be seen), with the canned milk and sweetened condensed milk being poured on top:


And here’s what it looks like after the milk has been absorbed:


Next you chill the cake for several hours, and then frost it with the dulce de leche:


Here you can see a piece of the finished product:


I served mine with a scoop of French vanilla ice cream. And I can tell you that one small piece was very rich. The recipe in the link above, which is made in an 8”x12” pan, should be enough to serve 12-16 people, especially if served with ice cream.

Pumpkin Soup with Brown Butter and Roasted Pumpkin Seeds

eat. Yesterday was Hallowe‘en, a shortening of the phrase All Hallows Evening. That makes today All Hallows Day, aka, All Saints’ Day. And tomorrow, November 2nd, is All Souls’ Day, known in many Latin American countries as the el día de los muertos, the Day of the Dead. All a very end-of-the-year, dying plants and fallow fields kind of metaphor, eh?

But truly, we’re not interested in any of this. The only thing on our minds right now is how to avoid eating all that left over candy, and what to do with all those damn pumpkins, right?

one of the 3 pumpkins I had from a volunteer plant this year

I can’t help you with the first, but here’s a recipe to help with the second. You may think that cooking with pumpkin is messy and a pain, but it’s actually quite easy—much easier than dealing with butternut squash, which have an incredibly thick skin and make me fear for the loss of my fingers every time I cut one up.

Start by cutting your pumpkin in half, scooping out all the pyuck, and slicing it into manageable sized pieces. (And yes, it’s fine if it’s been made into a Jack O’Lantern, as long as you take care to remove the candle wax first, and assuming you haven’t kept it so long that it has started to mold.) Brush the pieces with olive oil, season with S&P, and if you have it on hand, snip a sprig of oregano for each piece:


Lay the pieces face down on a baking sheet, with a sprig of oregano under each piece. (Line it with foil or parchment to ease clean-up; the baked pumpkin can be hard to scrub off.)


Bake at 350°F until a fork slides into them easily—40-60 minutes. They should have started to turn brown:


Peel off the skin, discard it and the oregano, and put the pulp into a large pot:


Add about an equal amount (by volume) of a rich stock. I used homemade chicken stock (recipe here):

you can see my stock was still frozen

Bring it to a boil and let it simmer for about 20 minutes.


Then let it cool enough to blend. You can do this either in a regular blender, or with one of those “stick” blenders, which is what I have (they are a must-have if you make a lot of soup).

Now you have the basic puréed soup. At this stage you could stop and just season it with S&P. But I chose to add about a cup of half-and-half, a half cup of sherry, and about 2 tablespoons of brown sugar:


Cook it a little longer to boil the alcohol out of the sherry, and then thin the soup to what you’d like, with either water, stock, or more half-and-half or milk. You can make the soup up to this point a day or two in advance, which I recommend doing, as the flavors will meld better if it’s made ahead.

The secret to really special soups is their garnish. Not only do they make the soups look pretty, but they add interesting flavors and textures to what would otherwise be a one-note-dish. For my pumpkin soup I decided on brown butter and roasted pumpkin seeds.

I was too lazy to roast my own seeds and crack them all open, so I bought some raw ones at the store. The afternoon before my dinner party, I just heated some butter in a cast iron skillet and them tossed them in and let them brown—stirring constantly, as they want to burn—and then sprinkled them with salt:


Brown butter is simply butter which has been slowly heated to the point where the milk solids start to brown. So all you do is put a chunk of butter into a heavy skillet,


and let it cook—again, stirring often—until it starts to brown:

it’s hard to see the color here because of the black pan,
but trust me that it’s a nut brown

This should be done soon before service, so the butter doesn’t re-solidify.

To serve the soup, reheat it, and ladle it into the bowls. Then drizzle on the brown butter and sprinkle on the pumpkin seeds. I also added a dollop of my yocheese (click here to read about this). Sour cream, crème fraiche, or yogurt could be used instead.

Here’s the finished product: