Great Tomato Sauce

Particularly successful pasta sauce today. Slow-cooking is always best, but this time I made the sauce in two parts to attempt to match the cooking technique to the ingredient. Mostly, I didn't want to slow-cook the fennel bulb in the tomato sauce, as it doesn't taste of anything if you do that. So I oven-braised it instead.

( Recipe )

Result: Fennel tastes fennel-y, sauce tastes saucy, garlic is kinda roasted, and it generally came out really well. Don't munch on the little peppers if you have issues with that sort of thing.

Brined pork chops with sweet potatoes, apple, and corn

Brining (especially of pork chops) has become very fashionable these days. McGee assures us that this is because our meat is leaner than it used to be, and this helps to compensate. He also gives the proportions of salt for getting different levels of softening.

Brining usually calls for 24 hours; I did it in more like 12, but I think the pork chops I got were rather less thick than gourmet cookbooks assume. They were the thickest center-cut chops I saw at the grocery store...

Looked at a couple of recipes and realized that it involved making this really tasting looking brine which would be too salty for anything else. What to do? Cook something that doesn't mind salt, of course, then toss just the liquidy part and keep the herbs and spices!

( Recipe )

Result: quite yummy. The potato doesn't get salty if you pull it out of the brine when the brine boils, and the oven roast slows the cooking so the centers really get sweet. The residual spices make it all taste yummy. The brined pork chops were tender and divine. A notable success all round, I think. If only there had been more leftovers! Next time if I have more advanced prep time I'll try doing a big hunk of pork and several days in the fridge.