The Elaborate Monthly: Pork Chop Sauté With Peaches

Achievement: #34. Have One New Elaborate Homecooked Meal a Month

Funnily enough, we made our August meal waaaaaaay back in the beginning of August… and it took me until September to post about it. My bad!

However, this August, I decided to make a homecooked meal not only for my husband and myself, but a yummy batch of homemade treats for one little red dog. For your viewing pleasure, I have included both meals in this single post.

Back on August 7, I was feeling ambitious and decided to take over the reins on dinner preparation. I had just received some lucious, juicy peaches from Soergel’s Orchards, so I was super excited to try out this delicious recipe I saw in one of the recent issues of Cooking Light.

August Meal
Don’t let the title fool you: anything labeled ‘super fast’ to the normal chef takes at least twice as long when cooked by me. You would think being married to a good cook for four years would have rubbed off somehow, but it hasn’t. I still only have mastery of lengthy Ukrainian dishes.

August Meal
One of those lengthy Ukrainian dishes is our Christmas eve standard: mushrooms in butter and onions. Yum!

August Meal
There’s something about the smell of this cooking on the stove that just makes me think of home. My mum makes these better than anyone on earth could ever dream!

August Meal
And then, since it WAS still summer, after all, I of course had to include my favorite summer dinner food: corn on the cob. You can see how fascinated Lucy was with this.

August Meal
It was almost as if she had never stuck her head into a trash can to eat corn husks before!

August Meal
The recipe that I made was the skillet pork chop sauté with peaches It looked so delicious in the magazine, I just had to try to recreate it. Here’s my ingredient list.

August Meal
I made Michael chop up the green onions. I have a very hard time using a knife
without injuring myself.

August Meal
This is the part where I want to point out to Cooking Light that no recipe can be ‘super fast’ if it involves creating a reduction. Reductions are tough!! This was mid-reduction of the peach sauce. Oh did it smell so good!!

August Meal
And this is what the assembled plate looked like. A bit too much couscous – honestly, if we made this recipe again, I would definitely do something different with it. Even using the sauce from the peach reduction didn’t do much to give this couscous some flavor. The pork and peaches were excellent though!

August Meal
And there is the table, with the addition of the corn cobs. I don’t know about you, but in my house, if it’s summer, corn on the cob goes with everything!

A little later in the month I had an opportunity to volunteer with the fantastic Hello Bully at the annual Bark in the Park doggy festival in North Park (it truly is a doggy festival – they had soooo many treats and games for the dogs, and even an area of kiddy pools for them to splash in!). The table next to ours was selling some delicious natural doggy treats (I am so, SO sorry I didn’t get the name of the ladies at the booth), and one of the most popular treats was a bag of sweet potato chews. Well, since Lucy has some food allergies, it is sometimes a challenge to find a healthy treat for her. Sweet potatoes are in her natural dog food, so I figured, what better snack than these? Unfortunately, they sold out pretty fast. But the chef was more than happy to share her secrets, so I decided to whip up a batch for Miss Lucy at home! Lucy has asked permission to write the rest of this entry, so please, direct any complains about grammatical errors to the little red one.

Miss Lucy
Hi everyone, my name Lucy, and I will shows you how to make sweet potato chewies. They are so good, you should all make them for your doggies like my mommy and daddy did for me!

August Meal
Step one when you make treats is to pick a good sweet potato. As you can see, I have chosen to inspect this potato for good quality. I thinks, this quality is good. I thinks I am not quite sure what a good potato is, but this might be one.

August Meal
Step two is that you call in your daddy to slice it up. Mommy says you need a sharp knife, and well, I loves Mommy, but sometimes, when she has a knife and is making the foods in the kitchen, I just tries to stay away. Daddy says the slices have to be ‘one-third of an inch’ thick. I doesn’t know what that is. I thinks, sometimes, Mommy and Daddy say, “Lucy don’t you move one inch” when I am trying to sneak something off the table, so I think maybe, you make the potatoes a little less than I allowed to move toward the table.

August Meal
Step three is you coats the potatoes in honey and call in your inspector again. I am always inspector, because I so very good at it. See, I inspect all those potatoes, and all of them, I think I will wants to eat them.

The next part is the sucks. You has to put them in the oven for a million years. (Note from Lucy’s mum: ‘a million years’ in puppy time translates to three hours in real time. Preheat the oven to 250 degrees and cook an hour and a half on each side.)

August Meal
Okay Mommy, I takes it from here. This the most disappointing part of making treats. This when the treats come out of the oven, and you think, “OMG I gots treats!” but then, Mommy puts them back in the oven again. Oh, the tears. Oh I was so sad.

Sad Lucy
This how I spent most of the million years. I laid sadly on the couch while my speshul treats were in the oven. Oh I could smells them from the couch, and I just wanted to eats them all, but Mommy said, “Lucy you must be payshents.” Oh I am so bad at payshents.

August Meal
But finally, all the treats come out the oven!!! Then Mommy puts them in a speshul contain-or so that I knows where they are, and when I wants one, I can go and I can sit and look at the contain-or.

August Meal
And this the last step. This the step where I, Lucy, sits so nicely and use all my payshents in the world, and then, Mommy says, “Oh Lucy, you such a good girl with such good bee-hayve-yours, I gives you all these treats.” And this the best part. This the part where I so happy.

Okay, Lucy’s mum back at the keyboard again. Hope you enjoyed our August foods, and hope you enjoyed Miss Lucy’s debut entry (those of you who read my Facebook get to read her diary entries all the time). If you’re planning on trying the sweet potato chewies for your dog, I have to give this advice: 1/3 of an inch is the absolute thinnest. Ours were a little less than that, due to the lack of a sharp knife and some difficulty in slicing, and the bottoms were a little crispier than they were chewy. Lucy loved them just the same, and the house smelled delicious for almost a full day, but the treats were gone in an instant. I think the point of them being chewy is the dogs being occupied for a bit. Unfortunately for us, she chomped them down quickly and begged for more. At least we know the flavor was good!

More elaborate meals to come, including the potential for some more doggy treats once the weather cools off and I can bake some peanut butter cookies at a higher temp!!

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