Saturday, December 5, 2009

This Little Piggy Went to Market

I have a couple of pork chops in the fridge, and I'm hoping to cook them so they won't be a. crunchy, or b. underdone. Pork is tricky. For years, people were told never to eat undercooked pork. Cook it well. (My stepmother used to say, "Cook it 'til it hollers help") Scary stories about the dangers of trichinosis, caused by the trichina worm, which would get into your muscles and erode your strength and there was no cure and you could DIE! So we obediently "cooked it 'til it hollered help." Now, we are told that freezing will kill that pesky little worm and we don't have to cook it quite as long, and drying up every single bit of moisture in the meat. But somehow, it still gets dry and I really don't enjoy washing down my food as if it was a pill. I've been surfing to find a nice, tasty recipe for those chops.
I love pork, in any or all of it's many forms...Roast, chops, bacon, sausage, ham, pulled, pushed, scrapple (you know, everything but the oink), whatever. I love it.

Almost five years ago, I was diagnosed with an insufficient aortic valve in my heart. Although I was asymptomatic at the time, it was strongly suggested that it was serious enough to have it fixed before symptoms became evident and it could be too late to effect the repair. I was allowed to cruise through the holidays, and surgery was scheduled for late January '05. They did hours of pre-op testing; they gave me some looooovely pre-op meds; they put me to sleep and implanted a porcine valve in my aorta...That's porcine, as in pig, as in oink... When I awoke, I had tubes and IV's and --- you don't wanna know...Five days later, they took me out of the post-op CICU and sent me to another floor of the hospital where I had to prove that I could take care of my basic needs - bathroom, wash, dress/undress and ambulate unassisted...
During my stay in the CICU, I was being fed a god-awful diet known as the Ornish diet, which consisted pretty much of anything bland, tasteless, unsatisfying, because they assume that if you had to have open-heart surgery you had been eating a lot of bad-for-your-heart stuff...Not so, in my case, but there's no arguing with the dictatorship that is nursing staff...Oh, they were nice enough to me, but I had
fake eggs, Butter Buds, skim milk, decaf coffee...Even my doc couldn't get them to change it...However, when I was transferred to the DIY unit, he put in an order for a regular diet...WhooHooo!...I was transferred in the late afternoon, and dinner that evening was - wait for it - Pork Teriyaki...Breakfast the next morning was Real Coffee...Scrambled eggs, toast and Bacon...I'm assuming that after they dispatched the little piggy to get the valve for my leaky heart, they made sure that he didn't die in vain...Ever since, I have this uncontrollable urge for barbecued ribs...

So, anybody got a good recipe for these chops?

No comments:

Post a Comment