False Advertising

I hate false advertising. “You’ll drop 10 pounds in 24 hours!” “Your hair will be free from gray for 50 years!” Yeah. You know.

I feel the same about cooking. Meals that can be conveniently completed in 30 minutes or less. Yeah, maybe the cook time is only 10 minutes but the chopping of a million vegetables beforehand? Really only takes 15 minutes after the 5 minutes you spent pulling every spice out of the spice cabinet looking for the 2 year old curry powder.

Or the $3, $5, or $10 dinners that call for red wine, plus beef, plus 3 different veggies. A bottle of wine will be half that budget!

Anyways, there are some real meals that DO fall into these categories (I even have a few labeled on this site). So I am just sayin’ that sometimes things aren’t exactly what they seem.

Like the picture below.

It is kinda like false advertising. This dish looks really good and healthy. And that is what it was, once it was finally fully cooked. You see the time this picture was taken the sweet potatoes were not fully cooked, they were actually pretty hard. But alas the life of a food blogger! I had to get my ‘prefect’ photo in the fading natural light and actually had to leave before this dinner was done cooking, because it took way longer than the instructions stated.

WAY.

Then I realized that I had not read the instructions correctly and did not par-boil my potatoes beforehand. So in real life the potatoes in the pictures should look a little more ‘pruney’ and brown on the edges. This tasted wonderful when I was all finally cooked and I think this would be a wonderful meal prepared in the crock-pot in the future, to obviously avoid the whole par-boiling issue.

Pork Chops and Sweet Potatoes
Printable Version
Prep Time: 15 minutes Cook Time: 40-45 minutes Serves 4

Salt and pepper
1/2 cup flour
4 loin pork chops, 1 inch thick
2 teaspoon vegetable oil
2 sweet potatoes, chunked and par-boiled
2 tablespoon butter or margarine
1 cup apple jelly
1 cup orange juice
1 tablespoon lemon juice
Grated zest of 1 lemon
1 teaspoon dry mustard
1 teaspoon paprika
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger

Combine salt, pepper and flour in a shallow pie pan. Dredge the chops in flour mixture and brown in hot oil in a frying pan. Remove chops to shallow baking dish and add sweet potatoes.

In a saucepan, stir together the butter, jelly, orange juice, lemon juice and zest, mustard, paprika and ginger and simmer 3 minutes. Pour half of sauce over the chops and potatoes and bake, uncovered, at 350 degrees, for 40 to 45 minutes. Baste with the remaining sauce during the cooking time.

adapted from Family Fun Magazine