My favorite dish is from one of my many ATK cookbooks and is Spanish Pork Chops with rice. (America’s Test Kitchen, 2010) Because the dish will be topped with olives and toasted almonds, you must carefully toast almond slivers first in a shimmering clean pan and set them aside. The smell of browned almonds is a great way to start such a savory and salty meal.
There is a trick to slice olives in half: place several on a plate, cover it with another plate (as if you were stacking them without the olives) and carefully slice through all of the olives at once. Next you prepare the rice by cooking chorizo, adding onions, garlic, diced tomatoes, and instant (parbaked) rice.
From the Grocery Store
I purchased a sous vide a few years ago, and this tool makes cooking meat simple and never dry. By adding a bone in pork chop to a ziplock back, along with salt and pepper, you can bring the pork chop to exactly the right temperature with the sous vide water bath and simply sear it in the pan for one minute on each side. I have been known to go for a bike ride or a swim while my food is safely cooking indoors with the sous vide. Combining the seared chop along with salty spicy rice will leave you full and content.
The Spanish pork chops with rice dish is one of my favorites because it reminds me of my Spanish heritage: the pork on a leg, known as jamon iberico, is something you see in windows and at lunch counters everywhere in Barcelona. Olives are a Mediterranean staple at most meals, either as an ingredient, or brought separately as an appetizer to eat and uncouthly try to find a way to spit out the seed. Almonds are best if they are Spanish marcona almonds. To be able to make this nearly perfect every time is something that pleases me when I know I won’t under or overcook a meal that takes time and effort to make.
A copy of the entire recipe and ingredients can be found here:
http://www.startribune.com/spanish-pork-chops-and-rice/135699198/?refresh=true
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