Pork and Potatoes

It looks like the blood pressure medication and our efforts to cut sodium are starting to pay off! Granted the blood pressure machines at the grocery stores are apparently a little dodgy (potentially ill-fitting cuffs, little calibration or maintenance, etc) but over the course of last night, our brand new home monitor was giving me a reading of about 118/75, and Chris a reading of about 128/80-ish, which is a vast improvement. Granted there's some debate among "experts" over what kind of at-home devices are best, and whether wrist or arm ones are more accurate, blah blah blah, but the point is that the numbers are pretty good.

But on to the cooking - with pictures this time! Sorry, I'm not exactly a pro photographer here, but at least it's an idea of how things should look, more or less.

First, we have Baked Pork Chops. First thing I changed here was the bread crumbs. Even in plain ones there's a lot of sodium, and there's even more in any seasoned ones. So after some debate, I ended up getting a box of Panko to try. They held up pretty well in meatballs, and despite the fact that it was a little more difficult to get them in a good layer on the chops they actually worked pretty well.

The key to this recipe is not to rush the browning part - just a little olive oil and get the breading nice and browned. You're not trying to actually cook the pork chops since they're going in the oven - this is just to set the coating. I always lightly spray the baking dish with a little bit of cooking spray to help the cleanup later. Generally, they look the same after the first hour of baking as they do straight out of the pan:

I'd picked up a can of Campbell's cream of mushroom soup for sodium restricted diets, but as soon as I popped open the can before I put the chops in the oven, I knew i had a problem. For one thing, well... the soup smelled awful. But for another, it was too runny. The soup is the main component in a kind of gravy-ish sauce that tops them, but once you mix in the milk and white wine, it gets kind of runny. I tried mixing it together anyway but it was definitely the wrong consistency, and the wine taste was much too strong. So while the chops were baking I dashed back to the store (no small feat considering that I take the bus) and grabbed two more cans of soup: Campbell's reduced sodium and Kroger brand lower calorie or fat or whatever it is that I've forgotten. It's a fair bit more sodium, but the Kroger brand ended up winning, and it's still less than regular cream of mushroom soup. Top the chops with the soup and bake for another half hour:

The thing to remember here is that you're not going to get a crispy-breaded pork chop out of this. They're going to soak up some of the soup and get soggy, but they taste amazing. But a lot of people reviewing the recipe seemed to want to ding it for being soggy, which makes me wonder if they understand what happens when you put bread in liquid. But those are probably the same ones who claim they made a recipe "exactly as-is, except I changed the spices, used beans instead of corn, and omitted the beef in this steak recipe." You laugh, but people do almost that exact thing.

To go with the pork chops, we obviously needed veggies. Since the frozen mashed potatoes have so much sodium but we still wanted some kind of potato, Chris suggested we try Cowboy Mashed Potatoes. I was a little hesitant at first because of the jalapeno, but it's really nothing to worry about. It wasn't spicy at all, and I have just about the lowest tolerance in the world for spicy stuff.

I used 4 small-ish red potatoes, 4 of the white potatoes that have the same kind of skin as red potatoes (whatever those are, they were just marked "white potatoes" at the store), 1 medium sized jalapeno and about 3/4 of a bag of baby carrots. I cut the potatoes into fairly small chunks, cut the baby carrots into thirds, and cut the jalapeno in half and then in slices. I minced the garlic a little; not too finely because I didn't want it slipping through the colander when it was drained. Once filled with water and on the stove, it looked like this:

Pretty, isn't it? I was a little worried about mashing the chunks of carrot and the corn but it ended up fine. A lot of the carrots stayed more or less together, and the mashed bits probably helped the flavor of the potatoes. I'll admit that I did add a dash of salt, but not as much as I would have before - maybe 1/16th of a teaspoon, if that much. It's a little easier to gauge how much you're using if you sprinkle it into your hand first. Mix in a little cheese and it's done! We decided to top them with some sour cream for flavor but I think they'd be fine without it if that's not your thing, and you could probably add more jalapeno if you prefer spicier food.

And the result? Again, sorry for the lousy picture, I should have turned on the overhead light first:

My only complaint about any of it was that the pork chops didn't re-heat as well as the ones I made with bread crumbs. We had a TON of potatoes left over, easily enough for another meal and probably one more serving after that.