Food Waste Friday and True Food Confessions--May 23, 2013

It's time for Food Waste Friday, when the Frugalgirl encourages us to post pictures from the previous week of wasted food from our household. This accountability hopefully will help us to be more careful with our food and maybe save some money. Also, I am using this public forum to encourage us to eat out less which includes better meal planning. You can follow how we are doing in this endeavor by reading True Food Confessions.

This Week's Food Waste
Two teaspoons of mustard.
Two tablespoons of pasta salad.
(no pictures)

If you want to know the details, ask Theo and Wally respectively. I know this isn't much, but I included these to keep things honest, and I told my kids that I would. As much as they pretend that they don't care about our food waste, they really do.



This Week's True Food Confessions

Some delicious food we had this week.

Some nights just conspire against cooking at home. Tonight was one of those nights. Long about the time I ambled into the kitchen to fix some chicken for supper, the thunder started to rumble as the lightning began to flash. Soon torrential rains began. I waited for the storm to pass since it wasn't safe to be around the sink and stove. As I was waiting, I headed to the basement to the feed the cats. For once they weren't interested in their food. They were more interested in watching the water come in under the walls. In other words, the basement was flooding. Not bad like inches of water, but bad enough that every towel in the house is soaked and we're waiting for more to dry to be used again. In the meantime, Ward brought home Subway sandwiches. A wise decision.

The rest of the week was a mixed bag. The weekend involved fast food and pizza from Aldi's (huge, good pizza for 5 bucks.) The week involved easy, but tasty dishes with enough for leftovers. But by far, the favorite meal of the week was the baked pork chops we had. Last time we had pork chops, we cooked them on top of the stove and they were tough. This weekend, we baked the rest from that package and they turned out very well--flavorful and tender. I used a recipe from allrecipes.com. The pork chops were breaded, browned in a skillet then baked for a time before a gravy from creamed soup was added. Then they were baked some more. We served them with mashed potatoes and we had a true comfort food meal if there ever was one. Everyone was very happy.

I have reprinted the recipe below. I used two cans of soup instead of one because we wanted more gravy. I didn't have any white wine, so I used all milk. Also, I cooked the chops in the oven for 30 minutes before adding the gravy and then 40 more. They were nicely done in this amount of time. (We were using 1"thick pork chops.)

Until next time...

Baked Pork Chops 1

Ingredients:

6 pork chops 1 teaspoon garlic powder 1 teaspoon seasoning salt 2 egg, beaten 1/4 cup all-purpose flour 2 cups Italian-style seasoned bread

crumbs 4 tablespoons olive oil 1 (10.75 ounce) can condensed cream of mushroom soup 1/2 cup milk 1/3 cup white wine

Directions:

1.	Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
2.	Rinse pork chops, pat dry, and season with garlic powder and seasoning salt to taste. Place the beaten eggs in a small bowl. Dredge the pork chops lightly in flour, dip in the egg, and coat liberally with bread crumbs.
3.	Heat the oil in a medium skillet over medium-high heat. Fry the pork chops 5 minutes per side, or until the breading appears well browned. Transfer the chops to a 9x13 inch baking dish, and cover with foil.
4.	Bake in the preheated oven for 1 hour. While baking, combine the cream of mushroom soup, milk and white wine in a medium bowl. After the pork chops have baked for an hour, cover them with the soup mixture. Replace foil, and bake for another 30 minutes.

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Printed from Allrecipes.com 5/23/2013