Pork Chops, Cabbage & Asparagus
Well my fucking mom wrote me and told me that I shouldn’t swear as goddamn much (or at all) in my blog.
We all know what I say to that!
Not that I have a Pabst with me, but like I dunno, my fucking neighbor definitely does so I should just roll down the street.
I guess it’s pretty amazing that with all this goddamn swearing I still find time to cook for my family!
The weather has just been so lovely here recently that I’ve been trying to do as much cooking as possible outside, and with the wife and the youngest gone to sporting practice, I could make something that I know my eldest would actually eat that the other two wouldn’t. (See mom! I didn’t fucking swear in that paragraph. Fuck.)
Yes. I know. I married AND had kids with someone who won’t eat a pork chop. Perhaps it was the time that I kept telling her that apparently pigs taste like humans when I would cook it early on grossed her out? Shit. I guess this one is my fault. Sorry friends!
I originally wasn’t going to cook the cabbage because I thought it would be “sus” (as the kids like to say these days) for the kid, but, fuck, I had a half a head of cabbage left over, and what do we do with cabbages?
And not because the can harbor spiders (I’m really not helping you all find this meal delicious am I?), but because a burned cabbage is a delicious cabbage, and they hold up super well to other strong flavors. Since I was lighting the charcoal grill which is the hottest heat I can get in my backyard to cook over, I figured, fuck it, onto the grill it goes.
The pork was nothing special — I seasoned it and let it sit out for like 45 minutes while the grill got hot, and I took care of prepping the vegetables. When the grill was hot, I put it over the hottest part and rotated 90º after 2 minutes, flipped it after another 2, and then rotated it after another 2 for a total of 8 minutes on the grill (no, I didn’t need a calculator to do that, but the thought did cross my mind since I only wrote down three twos.) And then I tented it with foil and let it rest while I cooked the asparagus.
While the chops were on the grill though I also put the cabbages down that I had quartered and brushed with oil. I wanted to char them throughout the entire section, so I let them sit, moving them occasionally until the outer leaves were charred, and then fanned them open and got some char on the inner leaves.
At this point the pork chops had hid a nice medium (140ºish?) and so I sliced them and put them on the plate with the rest of the vege.
The cabbage got a special treatment too — I had cooked down some mustard, cumin, coriander, caraway and sesame seeds along with a crumbled up hot chili in some olive oil over low heat until the seeds started to pop. I spooned this over the cabbage and then put on a dollop of plain Greek yogurt and a squeeze of lemon juice.
While the pork chop was great, and the cabbage turned out way better than it should have being that I was pulling all of that shit straight out from my ass (which, quite honestly, is where 99% of the fucking words that come out of my mouth originate), the asparagus was the best part. No, it wasn’t like “hyper” local (although it was from Washington state), and not, it’s not because my kid ate what was on their plate, then asked for seconds AND thirds.
But.
It was the best part because we both apparently have the gene that CAUSES and CAN DETECT the odor of asparagus in our, er, fluid leavings. Which means for the next 12 hours we could both go to the bathroom and go, “EWWW WHO THE FUCK ATE ASPARAGUS.”
(Yes! Apparently some people can smell it but not make it, some people can make it but not smell it, and some people can’t do either. I guess we’re just fucking hashtag #blessed.)
