lemon-roasted pork chop, red dandelion; heirloom tomato

The pork chop recipe is a classic, but I may never have worked with cuts this thin before. It meant that it was more difficult to get the kind of juiciness characteristic of this cooking treatment, but by cutting the original recipe’s oven time almost in half (the recipe is described here), I came pretty close to the ideal.

 

  • two not very thick 8-ounce pork chops from the Schaller & Weber store, thoroughly dried, seasoned with sea salt and a generous amount of freshly-ground Tellicherry pepper, seared quickly on both sides inside a very hot, heavy oval enameled cast-iron pan, half of an organic lemon from Whole Foods Market squeezed over each, after which the lemon was left on the surface between the chops, the pan placed in a 425º oven for only about 5 minutes, flipped over, a crushed fragment of an orange-gold habanada pepper sprinkled on top and the lemon squeezed over the top once again, and replaced in the pan, which was returned to the oven for another 5 minutes, the finished chops then arranged on 2 plates, some of the pan juices poured over the top of each, the remainder poured into a sauce boat for use at the table [I had intended to garnish the chops with some purple micro radish but then forgot to do so, so they look a bit more simple than they do sometimes]
  • red dandelion leaves from Norwich Meadows Farm, dressed with some good olive oil, Alce Nero DOP ‘Terra di Bari Bitonto’ from Eataly, juice from an organic lemon from Whole Foods Market, Maldon salt and freshly-ground Tellicherry pepper
  • There was also a salad, arranged inside a low bowl next to the plates (barely visible in the picture), consisting of layers of 3 differently-colored heirloom tomatoes and one small red onion, all from Norwich Meadows Farm, topped with chopped bush basil and torn mint leaves, the herbs also from Norwich Meadows Farm, dressed with white balsamic vinegar, Maldon salt, and Tellicherry pepper, and mixed together by each of us at the table.

 

There was a cheese course. A dab of an Italian quince compote was added to the plate after the photograph below was taken (a very welcome guest).

 

  • the cheeses, all from Consider Bardwell Farm, were, from left to right, ‘Manchester’ a goat cheese, ‘Pawlet’ cow cheese, and a still-unnamed blue goat cheese,
  • there were garnishes on the plates, of freshly-ground Tellicherry pepper and chopped dill flowers from Eckerton Hill Farm
  • toasts made from slices of a She Wolf Bakery multigrain baguette (unbleached wheat flour, whole wheat dark rye, white starter, honey, sugar grain mix {millet, sunflower, coarse rye, oats, flax seed, sesame)

 

  • the wine throughout the meal was a California (Lodi) white, F. Stephen Millier Angels Reserve Chardonnay Lodi 2016, from Naked Wines 
  • the music throughout was Man Bartlett’s ‘Meditation for a morning commute‘, vocals and ambient sound recorded live on a downtown A train using only an iPhone (apeDelay, Echo Pitch, Reverb, Audiobus and AudioShare iOS apps), which he had composed today, followed by his 2016 album, ‘Space on Earth‘, described by the artist as “..the first album from a body of work I’ve been hearing in my head since 2012. Around that time I was becoming increasingly overwhelmed by the nonstop onslaught of New York, so I started thinking about sound as a meditative and transformational medium; basically as a way to calm my eyeballs and counter-stimulate my brain.”