Dinner Tonight

Dinner Tonight: Pork Chops, Maple Baked Beans, and Coleslaw
For those that don’t know, the Snook and I take turns cooking dinner just about every night of the week. We use a lot of recipes off the Internet, and I thought it would be fun to document some of them here for you. (And I know you guys like the food posts!) Tonight’s meal was designed around these Maple Baked Beans from Serious Eats. I started them early today. You use dry beans but you don’t pre-soak them; instead you simmer them for 20 minutes first. I found I actually had to cook them for 25 minutes as they were just too hard before that. Then I assembled the dish as directed in our crock pot and cooked it on high all day. After about 5 hours, the ham hock was falling apart. So I pulled out the bones and transferred the meat and beans to an oven-safe dish. I added the butter and brown sugar and finished them off in the oven. YUM! Very nice baked beans, not too sticky sweet. The Coleslaw is actually from another Serious Eats recipe. It’s pretty good, but I recommend you only make half (unless you want to be eating coleslaw for the next two weeks). The Snook just cooked the pork chops in a frying pan with a bit of olive oil, salt, and pepper. Nice meal, and we have plenty of leftovers!