On Tuesday I pulled out the chard and black kale plants I'd put starts of in the ground in September.... Let me address that quickly: interesting experiment, they just sat there through the early winter, hardly growing at all (not unexpected), then it turned unseasonably warm in January and they have provided me with greens for the last three months. The kale grew as you would expect it to in summer. The chard, however, bolted quickly into these large, two foot tall towers with base stalks about 2" in diameter, up the length of which smaller have grown the 4-5" tender leaves that have been gracing my salad bowls ever since. Considering that I expected nothing at all, I've been quite happy with that, and really only pulled them now because I need the room for tomatoes. But back to my story: so yesterday I had a lot of greens in the fridge. And, separately, I had taken a package of "country style pork ribs" out of the freezer before leaving for lunch with a friend.
Well, barbecue weather it did not turn out to be, and the "ribs" were what I think is the best cut of pork and the best carnivorian value for money in the whole grocery store: it's actually the prime rib end of the loin, cut in thick pieces, boneless. It's the tenderest and tastiest meat on the entire loin, but American shoppers supposedly disdain the cut for the tougher un-ringed end of the loin, so some butchers cut this up and sell it along with the lesser shoulder cuts as "country style ribs" for, usually, around $2/lb. You can eyeball the difference: it will be boneless, and the 'ring' meat is a very dark red, where the 'ribeye' as it were is a very pale pink so each "rib" is effectively two sections, two colors, connected by a short ridge of fat. I wish butchers would cut these as bone-in pork chops but anymore they just don't.
So there I was at 4:00 wondering whether to go for an oven-style barbecue replacement when I remembered the greens and thought "smothered pork chops", dirty rice. Yum, soul food.
Only, I've never made smothered pork chops before. Never even eaten them but once, in a small, neighborhood Southern California restaurant whose name is the zip code of Memphis, Tennessee, and whose kitchen is presided over by a woman brought west in the 60's by one of the worst husbands of all time, Tina's ex Ike Turner, as one of his "Ikettes". (The evening spent in that restaurant would make a great food mag short story.) Hers were quite good, but perhaps suffered a bit for the need to create, and hold, in quantity. Making my own version of the dish has been on my to-do list for 12 years.
Out of nowhere, yesterday, the time had come.
So I made myself a cup of tea and cruised the internet for recipes. And it quickly became apparent that the drill is this: make a highly seasoned flour, dredge chops, pan fry, remove, add onions and flour, cook to soften and thicken the roux, then add liquid to make a gravy. And as I read I realized that this dish was part of my childhood, after a fashion: my grandmother used to heavily douse pork chops with onion powder, pan fry, and make a flour roux-based pan gravy with sometimes water and sometimes milk. She probably would have filled it with onions if cooking just for her and Grandpa, because onions in Grammy's simple herb-less kitchen were her favorite seasoning. But since I as a child despised any food in which they were physically present, she'd have omitted them for my sake. Onion powder, I could stand.
Thus bit by nostalgia, it was a recipe from Tyler Florence that finally had the strongest appeal for a result that was perhaps going to be more grandma than Ikette, but would be also likely be more sophisticated than either. Namely, 1 cup flour seasoned with 2 tablespoons each onion and garlic powder, and a gravy finished with buttermilk. No additional onions. Oh, his recipe includes a goodly quantity of cayenne powder too, but I decided to leave that out for better balance with my giblet-less dirty rice which was going to be happily on the hot side owing to the addition of a generous amount of dried green jalapeno bits (Penzey's sells this). Since I used garlic salt instead of garlic powder, I omitted all other salts and chose beef broth over chicken but used less of it and more buttermilk, about equal parts, vs Tyler's 2:1 ratio. Why? Because I just thought it tasted better that way. Plus, oink oink, I wanted more gravy.
Anyway, great dish--Grammy would have been proud!--served with the lightly braised greens in a small bowl on the side.
Ingredients:
1 cup all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons onion powder
2 tablespoons garlic salt
1 teaspoon cayenne (optional)
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
4 pork chops or 8 "rib" cuts
1/4 cup olive oil
1 cup beef broth
1 cup buttermilk
Chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley, for garnish
Directions:
In a bowl large enough to dredge your meats, mix the flour and dry seasonings. Reserve some flour for your gravy.
Heat a large saute pan over medium heat, add oil. When the oil shimmers, add the dredged pork pieces and fry until golden brown on each side, about three minutes. Remove to a platter and add about 1 and 1/2 tablespoons of the seasoned flour to the pan drippings. Blend into a roux and cook for several minutes, then whisk in the beef broth and buttermilk. Cook until the gravy is nicely thickened and no raw flour taste remains, about 5-10 minutes. Finally, add the pork back to coat in the gravy and let the flavors marry--if using thicker cut pork chops, you may need to keep these in the skillet longer to finish cooking. Garnish with chopped parsley before serving.
WINE MATCH: for this something fresh and young seemed right. Zinfandel, actually, spoke to me but lacking any pop-and-pours in that department I chose a young (2006) Australian cabernet from West Cape Howe. Loaded with huckleberry and cedar flavors, but not overtly sweet, it was a good choice.
