Pork chops with apples

At this time of year, I look forward to pulling all of my recipe books out and being inspired to cook gorgeous, hearty and tasty food. These books are usually Nigel Slater’s Kitchen Diary editions – not only is he a brilliant cook, he writes absolutely beautifully.

Now, the Handsome One isn’t a huge fan of pork for some reason, although he loves a sausage *insert crude joke here*, so I am on a mission to make him fall back in love with a chop again, and I think I’ve done it with this pork and apple recipe.

It’s an incredibly easy recipe that you can amend to include the flavours you would like. The most important thing here is using free range, quality meat. Animal welfare is of great importance to me, so I cannot stress the importance of eating the highest welfare of meat. For example, an outdoor bred piece of pork, means the piglet might spend time outside as a youngster but then will spend rest of their days in a concrete pen inside. I’m sure some people may think if I care so much about animals I wouldn’t eat them, which I think is a fair question but I know where all meat comes from that I buy.

Most of the meat we buy comes from Lambournes Butchers based in Stow-on-the-Wold – the majority of their meat comes from Cotswold Farm Park, which is owned by Adam Henson. Having visited this farm park many times, I know how well the animals are cared for, well-fed and loved by all visitors! I buy our free-range chicken from Waitrose and yes, it is much more expensive, but we don’t eat great amounts of meat and in my opinion, you shouldn’t eat meat everyday. There’s so many incredible vegetable dishes to be celebrated.

What you’ll need is:

* A couple of sprigs of thyme or another woody herb such as rosemary
* About 10 or so sage leaves (use less or more if you wish)
* An onion or a couple of shallots if you have them, sliced
* Two free range pork chops (with the bone in ideally)
* A can of your favourite cider
* Two or three apples, depending on size (mine were quite big so I only used two) and slice into wedges (quarters and then into half)
* Rapeseed oil

Preheat the oven to 200C (220C if it’s not a fan oven). Then use a wide, deepish pan that you can also use in the oven and heat up a couple of tablespoons of rapeseed oil, with a pinch of sea salt and a couple of sprigs of thyme to flavour the oil. Alternatively, you could use rosemary or an unpeeled garlic clove instead. Whilst this is getting nice and hot, pat down your pork chops so that they’re dry and season with some salt and pepper, then brown these on all sides, especially the fatty side so you’ll get some nice crackling.

Once the chops are browned nicely, take them out the pan, and put them on a plate, turn down the heat to medium and add your sliced onions until slightly browned. If you feel so inclined (and I usually do), add a little knob of butter before you add your sliced apple wedges and sage leaves then cook for a few minutes.

Then nestle the pork chops back in and add about half a bottle (250ml) of cider to cover but not submerge the pork chops and pop these into the oven for 30mins. If you don’t have cider you could use apple juice or I dare say some stock, but you may lose some of the stickiness that you get from the cider. Once the 30 minutes is up, they should look like this.

We had mash (made by the handsome one because he’s northern and makes the BEST mash) and roasted beetroot with this, but you could have roasted potatoes, greens, a big leafy, green salad or just hunks of warm, crispy bread to mop up all the lovely juices!

Not the prettiest plate, I admit, but tasty enough to convert the handsome one into loving pork chops again!

Enjoy 🙂

A x