Some of my earliest memories are centered around meat and potatoes. Every Sunday my family would pile into the car and head over to my grandmother’s house for dinner. Without fail she’d always serve a roast alongside a mountain of mashed potatoes. My sister was a roast beef kind of girl, but I was in it for the roast pork. I loved that roast pork not because it was brined or smoked to rosy pink perfection. My grandmother wasn’t that kind of cook. She grew up on a farm, fussing was not in her DNA. No, what I loved about her roast pork was the applesauce that accompanied it. It was one of the first times fruit and meat crossed paths on my dinner plate and it was certainly not the last. Today’s Apricot Stuffed Pork Chops are just another by-product of a food obsession hatched in my formative years.
Heatwave #2 is underway in my neck of the woods, which means my oven and I are not on good terms. My ice machine and I? Well, there’s nothing on-again and off-again about that relationship. While it may be hotter than hell outside (45°C should not be a temperature) there’s no better place to cook. Standing over a hot charcoal grill in the sun for 45 minutes is much more bearable than sacrificing your air-conditioned habitat for a sheet pan dinner. Plus, what vegetable, what hunk of meat doesn’t benefit from a kiss from a charcoal grill? Today’s Korean Hanger Steak certainly did.