Fennel pork chops

I have been cooking these past few days. I must say it does bring a lot of personal satisfaction when you can concoct a great tasting dish from scratch.

Up to date, I have made 4 non-premade non-trivial dishes. Trivial stuff I made includes:

-Tuna salad [I have yet to make a REALLY good one, unlike whatever you can find pre-made on the market]

-Omelette

-Spaghetti [I mostly make my own sauce from tomato paste because it's like 5 times cheaper, and I can say it's my own sauce]

-Sandwiches [I have made pretty good sandwiches, relying on good ingredients]

-Oven-ready stuff

-Boiled vegetables

-Toast

-Instant noodles [Up to date, my instant noodle count is merely 2 cups in 17 days. I intend to keep this ratio, or make it even lower].

Ok..

May 10th, Fennel Pork Chops

The story of this dish goes back to when I first visited Xiaotian's place. He was paying 50$ more every month, but compared to my appartment, his is way cleaner, and have much better roommates. Anyways, I was looking around his kitchen, and I found an ample amount of interesting spices that the past resident left. As a firm believer in spices, and how they do not rot or go bad, I wanted to use some of it to make my first nice meal. I chose the fennel seeds. They smelled pretty good, but I had no idea they tasted kinda like licorice.

I looked up some recipe online, and I found one that seemed easy: fennel pork chops. It also required garlic salt and white wine. Among the other spices, garlic salt was already there. I was lucky.

I don't drink wine as of yet. Hence, I had to go purchase some at a local LCBO or Loblaws. I ended up going to Loblaws because it was the cheapest. No way I was going to pour half a bottle of $40 wine in a frying pan. I got a bottle for $7.50.

6 O'clock comes. It was time to start cooking. I realize I do not have a corkscrew. No biggy, XT and I go google/youtube "how to open a wine bottle without corkscrew". A method we found consisted of hitting the bottom of the bottle against a tree. So we tried it for a while (not on a tree though), without success. Too bad I don't have a video of this.. it would have made a fine addition to my blog. So we google more, and found that this trick did not work with synthetic corks (as our cheap wine obviously has a synthetic cork). We weren't that much of failures.

Other methods used a screwdriver, a screw, and something to pull the whole thing out like a hammer or pincers, but we did not have that kind of material.

Desperate and lost, we resolve to chipping off the cork, bit by bit. After a while, we realize it was going to take forever. Especially when you get to the deeper part of the cork, the knife won't have room to cut anything.

Randomly, XT just stabs the knife in the cork deep enough.. and I was able to do something like this:

So we finally started cooking.

The last picture wasn't very clear because of the lighting, and my phone camera sucks. It looked pretty good. The taste turned out to be pretty mediocre, something you would find in the V1 cafs. However, the texture was so good, it even surprised me. The tenderness was beyond what most restaurants would offer. Maybe it was the way I chose the pork chops.

Verdict:

Screw recipes. You need to learn the fundamentals of where each ingredient fits in the cooking process in order to recreate the dish. Or else, lots of small mistakes will compound together and your dish will turn out not as great as it should be. The next 3 dishes I made without following any recipes, and they were, in fact, awesome. You have to start with the basics, and be able to improvise on them, because that reflects true understanding. And then, you can experiment slowly to understand how each product interacts with another. Blindly following a recipe calls for a bad dish. It is like applying formulas and algorithms without knowing the underlying concept. Or learning a piece of music from the sheets, playing the notes without understanding them.

I give it a 6/10. Even though everything else was good, the taste was not satisfying. I have high standards.

Next post: The 3 well made dishes

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