Day Five--Pork Chops with Apples and Sage

Wow. I am full. I just finished the most delicious dinner. We are still in Olean and Laurie was kind enough to give me her kitchen to use. Dinner was later than we usually have and it and almost didn't happen.

We ate a late lunch and then 6 o'clock rolled around and we weren't really hungry. I waited until 6:30 before I even looked at the recipes and then freaked out because I was going to need to roast the potatoes for an hour. Oops. I ended up just boiling them and then making garlic mashed potatoes. The rest of the meal came together really fast. Tim came in and helped me for the last part.

So what did we have?

Pork Chops with Apple and Sage, garlic mashed potatoes and red swiss chard.

This dinner came together really quickly. I let the potatoes boil for about 30 minutes and then got to work on the rest. I browned the pork chops in some olive oil. Then I put the chops in a baking dish and sauteed the apples in a tiny bit of butter until they turned golden. I put them on top of the chops with a couple of leaves of sage. On top of that a tiny dab of Stilton cheese. I popped in the oven for a few to let the sage meld with the apples and melt the cheese a bit. While the chops were in the oven Tim and I worked on the potatoes and chard. I sauteed the swiss chard in a little bit of olive oil and garlic with salt and pepper. The potatoes were just the boiled red potatoes mixed with chopped up garlic, butter, a splash of milk with some salt and pepper. All that with some Merlot and it is all good. Eating real food isn't that bad. =)

Everyone loved the dinner. Aidan ate the pork and the potatoes and he had some of the chard. He actually said, "I kind of like this green stuff." We're making progress! I do have the receipts from this weekends eats and when we get home, I'll come back and edit with the cost of the meal.

We leave tomorrow morning to go home. I need to make my shopping list up tonight so that when we get home I can go food shopping. Monday night is going to prove interesting. I am going to the Peace and Justice Award dinner where there will be food served. I think I'm still going to go ahead and make the boys dinner. One nice thing with all of our meals so far is that we've had leftovers. This makes for yummy lunches the next day.

I think that is all I have for now. I'm going to go finish my Merlot and start packing up all of our stuff to go home. Until tomorrow. Happy cooking!

**edited to add cost of meal: Total cost was $30.77. Served 6 so cost per person was $5.13.