Alright, I blog about our travelling, our ups and downs, my day to day events, my friends, my family, but, to date, I haven’t blogged much about cooking.

Although I do cook quite a lot, I’m most definitely a novice.

I was raised in a family where the majority of meals were ‘simple’, meat (nothing too adventurous), veg (nothing fancy) and potatoes.  We never had a lot of money, we couldn’t afford any exotic ingredients and my dad was never one for ‘fancy feeding’.

It wasn’t until my teenage years that I started trying other things, Chinese food, Italian food (pretty much lasagne and pasta – whoohoo! Adventurous or what?) and it wasn’t until I went to university up in Belfast, that I tried Indian food (yay! Indian Ocean *sniff*) and some basic elements of Mexican food (Fajitas anyone?).

By this stage, I’d started to cook for myself – nothing crazy, or ‘out there’, because, as a student, I still didn’t have any money for ingredients to experiment with recipes.

Heinz 57 beans were a common element in my diet.

Since moving to Texas two years ago, pretty much straight on the back of getting out of university, I’ve started to cook a lot more.  It’s been a combination of things, having the time, a decent kitchen, an accommodating husband, enough money for decent, fresh groceries and the overwhelmingly easy access to an exorbitant number of recipes.

It’s becoming quite the hobby and Col hasn’t once told me ‘don’t make that again’ or ‘I don’t like that’, I guess that’s as good a testament as I could ask for!

Tonight, I tried, a recipe from the 2009 Taste of Home healthy eating cookbook.  A month or two ago, Taste of home had a $5 cookbook sale (down from around $20) and I picked a few of them up.

It’d been a while since we had pork, so I picked the recipe for the Mandarin Pork Chops to try out, this was the first recipe I tried from the T.O.H books and it looked pretty simple.

• Prep/Total Time: 30 min.

Ingredients:

• 1 can (11 ounces) mandarin oranges
• 1 tablespoon cornstarch
• 5 green onions, sliced (I substituted and just used regular onions)
  
• 1/4 cup packed brown sugar
• 1/4 cup ketchup
• 1 tablespoon cider vinegar (I only had apple cider vinegar on hand)
  
• 1 teaspoon prepared mustard (I used honey dijon)
  
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 3 whole cloves (I didn’t have any of these on hand so didn’t use them!)
  
• 6 boneless pork loin chops (4 ounces each)
• 1 tablespoon butter

Directions

• Drain oranges, reserving juice; set oranges aside. In a small bowl, combine cornstarch and 3 tablespoons reserved juice until smooth; set aside. In another small bowl, combine the onions, brown sugar, ketchup, vinegar, mustard, salt, cinnamon, cloves and remaining juice; set aside.
• In a large nonstick skillet, brown pork chops in butter on both sides. Add onion mixture; bring to a boil. Reduce heat; simmer, uncovered, for 8-10 minutes or until a meat thermometer reads 160°, turning chops once.
• Remove pork and keep warm. Discard cloves. Stir cornstarch mixture into pan juices. Bring to a boil; cook and stir for 1-2 minutes or until thickened. Stir in oranges. Serve with pork chops. Yield: 6 servings.

Recipe from here: www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/Mandarin-Pork-Chops

While making it, I have to say I was a bit concerned, tomato ketchup and sugar? ugh.  I really was heart scared that Col wouldn’t like it (or me for that matter), but in actual fact, it came out quite tasty!

It was seriously easy to make, quick and tasty – what more do you want from a recipe?  Col says he enjoyed it (actually he gave me a thumbs up) and would like me to cook it again.  He did, however, make a good comment that it ‘flirted’ with being too sweet, it was JUST on the border, but, since we both cleared our plates, it stayed on the right side of the ‘too sweet’ line.

I did defrost too much pork for the recipe, so today (or tomorrow), I’m going to try the Taste of Home Maple ginger pork chops with some noodles or rice…