Budget cooking: pork chop and veggies

Life has been hectic lately, so I haven't been keeping up with the post schedule. I'd apologize, but neither of us really give a shit. Anyway, I picked up a pack of pork chops on my Aldi excursion, and this meal is one of the uses I found for them.

You know I love my veggies. I definitely spend more time prepping them because they'll make or break a dish faster than the meat. I went with orange bell pepper, yellow onion (looks raggedy because I've been grating it a lot lately), a radish, half a mini cucumber, a couple mushrooms, and a few cloves of garlic.

My pork chop was simply seasoned with some salt, pepper, and ground sage. I tried to put a few slices in the fat around the edge to keep it from curling up while it cooked, but that turned out disastrously, as you can see.

Despite the curvature, it cooked pretty well. Maybe a tad overdone on the first side (pictured above), but the underside came out better. I may have been (i.e. I was) loading the dishwasher while it was cooking and may have (i.e. did) lose track of time for a minute there.

After the pork chop was cooked, I removed it from the pan and added in some sliced onion and sliced garlic.

Oh, did I forget to mention my veggie prep? I thinly sliced a little bit of the onion and crushed and sliced the garlic. I also diced about a quarter of the bell pepper and the radish, halved and sliced the cucumber, and sliced the mushrooms.

Anyway, once the onions and garlic had caramelized a little, I poured in a splash of malbec to clean the bottom of the pan off, then dumped in my veggies and let it all simmer in there together for a few minutes. The moisture cooking out of the veggies kept the pan from drying out, and I ended up with a nice red wine sauce in there. I added a bit of kale, some salt, and some pepper to finish it all off.

Plating was kept simple. I scooped some veggies onto my plate, then laid out half of the pork chop (thinly sliced) alongside it. Tasty, looks halfway decent, and inexpensive as fuck.

I'm not going to keep doing the precise cost breakdown because I'm fucking lazy. I'd guess about 2 or 2 and a half bucks for this one.

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