Even if I’m not feeding the blog, I have still been cooking, though a little less than usual, and definitely less-complicated than usual. Here’s a recipe I meant to share a long time ago. It’s a combination of a recipe Mom has been using a lot lately to brine pork chops (I’m not sure where she got it), and a recipe from one of the last issues of Gourmet (tear!). It’s actually super easy and fast, requiring hardly any hands on work, but its presentation and taste is much more impressive than the amount of work that goes into it.

It does require a bit of advanced planning because of the brining step, but you don’t want to leave that out. I used to never cook pork chops because they always seemed to dry out on me, but the brining keeps them juicy and tender. (Interestingly – I recently learned that the way this works has to do at least partly with the motor protein myosin, which I’m studying; if you want to know how, ask me about it sometime.) It’s similar to marinating, but in a very high salt solution. Because it’s so much salt, you only leave it for a couple hours, instead of the several hours or overnight that you might normally marinate something. I haven’t tried, but I think it would probably get too salty if you left it longer than that. (If someone tries it and it works, let me know.

Another nice thing about this recipe is it’s easy to scale up or down — I first made it for just myself when Matt was in Taiwan, but making it for several folks is easy too. The pork chops are great with some sauteed greens, perfect for this time of year!

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