The other white meat?

Pork, the other white meat. Or so the saying goes. It should be more like "the other amazingly huge pain in the ass to cook in the kitchen when you think you know what you're doing and screw it up to the point where not only do you not cook it right, you don't even get to choke it down for dinner" meat. Ok so maybe that would be a bit long of a tag-line for the commercials.

Today I'm just frustrated. Once again everything went wrong, and what's got me so mad is that I don't know what I did to make everything go so poorly.

I had planned on once again knocking out two recipes with one stone. I picked up some very nice double-thick (1") pork chops from the store. Since pork has a talent for going very well in both sweet and savory dishes, I wanted to do one sweet pork chop and one savory. I wanted to be able to show the different outcomes of broiled vs. baked. Not so f*#&(@' much tonight.

I did everything that I would normally do for a nice juicy steak. Season, sear, and place in oven to come to temperature. Well the searing turned out to be blackening, and the oven thermometer I was going to use to get a perfect cooking temperature read went schitzophrenic on me and had some kind of meltdown, despite it "supposedly" being able to handle oven temperatures. So long story short, no thermometer means no pork chops.

Well, ok so today was a stumble. But now I'm mad. I'll eat pork chops every day for breakfast, brunch, lunch, snack, dinner, late night snack and midnight refrigerator raids if I have to.....and I don't even really LIKE pork chops.

Grrr. Ok, ok. Take a deep breath....count to 10....think of clouds and fluffy puppies and such.

So. Tomorrow I'll be spending plenty of time researching what it is I did wrong, how I can correct it. And I'll also buy a thermometer that doesn't have a psycho meltdown in a 300 degree oven. Now where's that bag of Cheetos I saw laying around earlier, It's beer and junk food time.

still four-hundred-sixty something to go.