Sunday Afternoons at Pike Place

Alright. I had the best of intentions to go to bed early tonight after a not-so-restful sleep last night, but PBS is airing old episodes of French Chef and Julia's dedication to the bouillabaisse a la Marseillaise she's demonstrating inspired me to get writing. On a side note, I love that she pronounces basil as bah-sil the way I'm used to hearing it. Everyone here says bay-sil and accuses me of being a heathen Canadian.

So, Kris and I decided as sort of an unofficial New Years resolution that if we ate healthy, home-cooked (or at least home-prepared) meals throughout the week instead of eating fast food and processed crap, we could reward ourselves on the weekend with a trip to Pike Market to buy some fresh ingredients with which to make ourselves a really nice Sunday dinner. Not only does Kris get to try her hand at being my sous chef but I also get to keep the skills I'm learning at school sharp.She doesn't know this yet, but I also intend to use the opportunity to do a bit of recipe testing for my final menu on her. I feel confident doing this because I know she won't attack the food and make gross eating noises like a certain husband in a certain recent movie about a certain chef and a certain woman who blogged about said chef...

This past Sunday, we (well, I) slept in nice at late before heading to the market at about 1:00. I have to be up at 4:45-ish every morning to get ready for class, so even if Kris was up and about much earlier than me, I deeply enjoyed the chance to get some extra quality time in with my pillows. Call me lazy if you want, but I was in the perfect mood to go marketing by the time we left the house.

(Oh Lord... Julia is now hacking away at an enormous cod head with a terrifying-looking medieval torture device-slash-meat cleaver without so much as blinking. I forgot how much she makes me giggle. Americans are finicky about leaving the heads on, you see...)

Kris has a knack for finding fantastic parking spots and our visit to Pike Place was no exception. She squeezed the car into a free parking spot right at the entrance and away we went! Our first stop was specialty food and wine shop, DeLaurenti. They have the shelves and shelves of imported goodies and culinary delights that make foodies giddy. Little jars of duck fat that made me daydream about how delicious anything cooked in it would be. About a jillion different varieties of salt, olive oil and an incredibly expensive bottle of 60-year old Modena balsamico whose presence I had to be coerced away from before I bought it in a fit of "GIMMEGIMMEPLEAAAASE". Cheese, salume, breads, cookies, crackers, preserves, chocolate, wines... I could have spent all day exploring all the curious little gems. We ended up purchasing carbonated white wine in a soda can that came with a straw for the sheer novelty of it, a bottle of curious white coral-like chunks of bicarbonate that you drop in water to make it fizzy that I just had to experiment with -more on that later- and a jar of Nutella as a little splurge.

A visit to the butchers gave us our two pork loin chops along with plenty of other delicious ideas as we looked over their other offerings. Some apples, squash, thyme, oregano, a jar of lavender honey and one of Mt. Rainier Fireweed honey later, we were ready to get cooking...

("This bird is in the height of it's...chickendom. Things like the age and, uh, race, wildly effect a chicken's expensivity.")

 We ended up cleaning in the kitchen for about two hours when we got home, simply getting some more of our stuff situated to our liking and getting rid of some of Kris' mom's old stuff. We staved off starvation with some crackers, salami and brie with sage, cinnamon and brown sugar as we cleaned. After we finished, it was mutually decided that we needed a quick rest, so we loafed for an hour or so before we got down to the business of dinner.

On the menu: Pan-Seared Honey Pork Loin Chops with Sauteed Apple and Squash

First, we prepared a quick marinade for the chops; fireweed honey, EVOO,  sea salt, cracked peppercorns, sage, oregano and garlic. Then we peeled, rondelled and sliced our apples and squash while our pork got happy in it's marinade. We discovered that Kris doesn't particularly enjoy having to peel things with a paring knife, incidentally, and in the future will likely be using a peeler.

Once all was prepped, the pork chops came out and we got a pan started on high heat. A bit (okay, a lot) more honey got drizzled over the searing chops, which helps lock in the moisture and also gives the pork a delicious golden-brown color all over while it cooks through. While that was working, we sauteed up our apple slices and squash with a little EVOO and pulling in the sage again, then a bit more salt and pepper.

The kitchen smelled absolutely delicious and once the pork was done, I demonstrated a quick pan sauce, plated, drizzled and voila!

I think in retrospect, I'd use a less starchy apply than Red Delicious for sauteeing because it didn't retain as much of the nice snap as I wanted, but the flavor was great. I mentioned in an earlier post that I'm all about letting ingredients taste like themselves and the produce did exactly that. The pork chops  looked absolutely gorgeous; the honey had deepend the color even more to almost a red-gold color that would have looked even more delicious on white flatware, but personally I think it looked pretty sexy on our black plates, too. I was very pleased with the taste, especially the pork. The fireweed honey actually added a bit of bite, which was perfect.

I really enjoyed working in the kitchen with Kris and I hope for her sake my occasional instructions were useful as opposed to a pain in the rump roast. I'm already thinking ahead to next week...