Category: Food

Prep time: 30 min­utes.

Cook time: 50 min­utes.

One thing I enjoy about social media and the inter­net in gen­er­al is the spread of ideas. Espe­cial­ly recipe ideas. These days it’s less of read­ing than watch­ing, and even though smell isn’t a thing yet, the visu­al aspect of the meal is whol­ly entic­ing.

So. Thanks to an online/­so­cial-media video, I made this entrée.

I’m sure if you looked it up you could find the/many recipe(s).

In my instance, I — as usu­al — tweaked the recipe to my lik­ing. I tend to fla­vor all of my meat the same way, so I did that last night. The recipe called for 2lbs of ground beef, green pep­per, white onions, 16 slices of bacon, salt, pep­per, cayenne pep­per, oregano, pro­volone and gar­lic pow­der.

I used 1lb ground beef, 1lb of meat­loaf mix (veal, beef, pork), an orange pep­per, sweet onion, soy sauce, some red cook­ing wine, salt, pep­per, sug­ar, gar­lic pow­der, pro­volone cheese, herbes de flo­rence, a tiny bit of red pep­per flakes, 12 slices of bacon, and A‑1 sauce.

The rea­son for the changes are taste pref­er­ence, green pep­pers give me awful heart­burn, I can’t tol­er­ate spicy things, I don’t like oregano, and instead of one giant one, I’d be mak­ing 2: one for me and one non-dairy ver­sion for a non-dairy per­son.

In my excite­ment, I for­got to take more pic­tures. Buh. But, here you go!

Results: amaz­ing fla­vor! I LOVED it! The pro­volone was PERFECT and MELTED so yum­my! The green pep­per would have giv­en it more kick, but I’m hap­py with only minor heart­burn. The bacon was crunchy! Mine in par­tic­u­lar was actu­al­ly too big even though it was half the size of the orig­i­nal recipe! The non-dairy ver­sion end­ed up being too dry because there was no cheese in it. The A‑1 end­ed up spilling out dur­ing cook­ing.

Fix­es: If I were to do it again, I’d line the non-dairy one with spinach to help keep the sauce inside and not soak­ing into the meat as much, as well as pay­ing atten­tion to the plug­ging the ends of the roll with meat.

High­ly rec­om­mend­ed and easy to make.

The meat pur­chas­es in my week­ly gro­cery run are heav­i­ly depen­dent on what is on sale and what is on clear­ance. Then I try to come up with some­thing. In an age where the inter­net is much more rea­son­able and con­ve­nient than an actu­al cook­book, thats where I turn for dif­fer­ent recipes. So start­ed my dilem­ma last evening after work. Pork chops. Phooey. Bing search and oo coun­try fried pork chops. 

This is the recipe I referred to: very detailed, nice pic­tures, over­all great recipe. How­ev­er, I have learned my les­son sev­er­al times over to not fol­low them to a T and so these days it’s lit­er­al­ly just ref­er­ence and I tweak the recipe to my lik­ing.

So how did I tweak? 

1. We nei­ther have nor can phys­i­cal­ly tol­er­ate but­ter­milk. I’m sure it would make it taste bet­ter so instead with the egg I put a lit­tle chick­en broth and mus­tard. 
2. No exact mea­sur­ing for me. Every­one has dif­fer­ent tastes so hav­ing cooked for a while I just winged it and hoped it was good.
3. I decid­ed to put soy sauce on the chops them­selves before bat­ter­ing up to give it more fla­vor. Worked very well.

My audi­ence (i.e. my picky broth­er and my dogs) loved it. He (the human) even asked if it was store pre­pared bat­ter and hav­ing learned that it was all from scratch com­pli­ment­ed it. Whoa. Always a good sign when the broth­er looks for more and the dogs fol­low me around after a taste in hopes of more hand­outs.

If you like gravy it would have been indi­cat­ed but I don’t care for it myself. My only regrets were not mak­ing more and that the oil either seemed to have degrad­ed or I over­loaded the pan for the final batch.

Hap­py cook­ing!