Thai Curry Pork Chops

You may have heard me whining about finding ingredients for this recipe earlier this week, but I finally got around to making the thai curry pork chops today.  Consisting of a sauce made from curry powder, cream of coconut, ginger, green and yellow onions, and heavy cream, these pork chops were pretty good.  Mark wants me to make them again, but I'm not so sure.

Let's review the largest problem: finding the ingredients.  If you factor in the time I spent in three different grocery stores trying to find all the items I needed to prepare these magical pork chops, as well as the cook time, it took me about two hours to make this dish.  I spent at least half an hour searching for the cream of coconut at Lowe's Food the other day.  Before you assume I wandered around like an idiot, which I only did for fifteen minutes, I actually asked for help.  I did this not once, not twice, but three times before someone could actually help me find what I was looking for.  Everyone was very nice, but it was not the most fun I've had in a grocery store.  (That would be the time I was in the Wal-Mart that had the McDonalds in it with the Ronald McDonald on the bench out front.)

Obviously, I wouldn't struggle to find the ingredients if I decided to make these pork chops again; I know where they are now.  I would, however, change up the ingredients a bit.  For this batch, I couldn't use the Frank's Red Hot Chile and Lime Sauce called for, as the grocery stores here didn't have it.  I used the Frank's sauce that is sweet and sour flavored.  This didn't impact the recipe, as far as I can tell, but my other change would.  Instead of using one inch thick bone-in pork chops, as directed, I would choose a thinner cut of pork or chicken instead.

The recipe instructed me to grill the pork chops, but as it was raining today, I was unable to use the grill.  I had to make due with pan frying them.  Because I made a miscalculation, they were a bit over-cooked.  The thicker cut of pork undermines the flavor of the sauce you baste with during the last third of the cook time.  If there had not been sauce set aside to serve with, the pork would have been flavorless.  As it was, I made four pork chops, instead of six, but I only halved the sauce recipe.  I still didn't have enough sauce to give my pork chops good flavor.  A thinner cut of meat would give you more flavor bang for your meaty buck.

The sauce was wonderful, and I felt a sense of accomplishment having created it.  I had to do a few things I had never done before.  Some of these tasks were simple, like cleaning and mincing green onions, which I had never cooked with before.  Grating and mincing onions did help me decide to pick up a Ninja food and drink making system at Sam's Club.

Other tasks were a bit stranger and unfamiliar to me, like grating ginger root.  I had read online that freezing ginger root makes it much easier to grate.  Unfortunately, I didn't take the advice of more experienced chefs and attempted to grate the root at room temperature.  It was a nightmare, and the leftover ginger root is now chilling in the freezer.

The recipe Mark chose this week definitely challenged me.  I had to find and use ingredients I was unfamiliar with, and I also got to try a meal I would not have chosen on my own.  I will be making the sauce again in the future, as it was delicious, very sweet, but I will probably utilize a different meat next time.  If you want to have a cooking adventure, you should definitely try making thai curry pork chops.  I'm pretty sure I leveled...