the review: pork chops and roasted cauliflower

“Oh, Mom. I love this dinner!” Words every mother wants to hear. And I heard them tonight. Twice.

Everything was delicious. Roasted cauliflower and pan fried pork chops (Cook’s Illustrated Cookbook, page 402). Sounds amazing, right? But it could have been a disaster. How many dry, flavorless pork chops have you had in your life? Not these. They were actually amazing.

My timing may have been a little off. I started by slicing garlic for both recipes, then mincing part of it for the pork chops. I chopped up the cauliflower, mixed it with the sliced garlic, drizzled some olive oil and lemon juice over the top, and seasoned with salt and pepper. Into the oven it went. Would have been better timing to wait until I had all of the dipping layers ready for the pork chops. Anyway, my next step was prepping the various coatings for the pork chops.

I’ve mentioned before that Cook’s Illustrated recipes sometimes involve very specific steps. Sometimes these seem a bit nutty. Go with it. One cool thing about Cook’s Illustrated is that they tell you why their recipes work. This makes you want to actually follow the directions. There are three coatings to the pork chops in this recipe. The first coating is simple corn starch. This is followed by a coating made up of a mixture of buttermilk, Dijon, and garlic. The final coating’s primary ingredient is – wait for it – corn flakes. Who doesn’t love breakfast for dinner?

Definitely get these together before putting in your cauliflower because once the pork chops have been coated, they need to sit for 10 minutes. Add that to 10-15 minutes cooking time, and you are at your 25 minutes for the cauliflower. Winner. I may have eaten half of the cauliflower out of the pan while I was waiting for the pork chops to cook. Just saying.

This sounds like a lot of work, but start to finish, we were eating in around an hour. Realistically, everything takes this long. Even spaghettios.