And so I made them.
For the pork chops, I used butterfly cut pork chops. I would have liked to purchase them from Teal's (a local pork producer), but I haven't been able to make it out to the farmer's market recently, so I made do with some seemingly trustworthy cuts from the grocery store. For the apples I used Empire because that's what I had in the fridge (in place of Granny Smith). I am sad to report that I used store-bought chicken bouillon instead of homemade (tsk tsk), but it still turned out well. The only complication was the stuffing part of things. I used ~6 toothpicks on each chop to try to keep 'em closed, but without luck. The stuffing fell out and so I pulled the toothpicks and decided not to fight the losing battle. It turned out delicious though, and because the pork didn't end up being "stuffed," I didn't feel guilty about cutting each chop in half so that we each had a REASONABLE serving of meat. (The recipe calls for 4 thick cut chops, but I used 2 butterfly-cut chops - roughly half of what they called for.) My favourite part of this recipe was toasting the almonds. They smelled DELICIOUS!!
For the salad I used red leaf lettuce because that's what I had in the fridge. I skipped toasting the walnuts because I was in a rush. I butcher the dressing because I forgot that I didn't have pomegranate juice and that we were out of ground cinnamon. It ended up being a bit of olive oil, a juice box (leftover from camping last summer!) of apple juice, a splash of sparkling wine, some busted up cinnamon sticks, some ground ginger, a bit of sugar, and a bit of salt. It was ok, but some tartness or zing would have been nice. Oh well. It did the trick. The blue cheese was delightful! It's not something we usually buy, so we savoured it and enjoyed every tasty little crumble.
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