Carnage du Jour - 31 August 2010

Well, it was pork chops again, and that's always a good thing.

This time, however, I was looking for a way to make it a bit lighter - not a lot of rice or pasta or potatoes to go with the pork.  Besides, it was too hot to do much cooking.  So ....

A bit of onion, sweated in some olive oil.  Removed from the pan, where the chops were then cooked in that nice onion-flavoured oil.  They had been dusted with kosher salt, some beau monde, and some chipotle powder on one side.  At the turn (of the chops), some orzo was added to a pot of boiling water - it finished up shortly after the chops were removed to rest on a platter.
But perhaps the tastiest part was when the onions went back in the pan, and cucumber slices were added to the mix.
If you've never cooked cucumber, you ought to try it.  They didn't soften and dissolve as one might have expected (I didn't), but rather held up quite nicely, with the browning adding a nice sweetness to their flavour.  As they were finishing up, I added some chopped tomato to the pan and gave it a quick stir.  A small amount of chicken stock was added, and then in went the (well drained) orzo.

Quite a nice dinner, and very quick and simple.

Reading List Update 2

Well, I've thought of a few more books I'd like to recommend to my loyal readers here.
As before, I've included the full list from earlier posts so you don't have to go looking through the archives to see what all was on there.

Enjoy!

• Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury 
• The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein 
• 1985, Anthony Burgess

Here's the original list (including the earlier update), just in case you haven't finished them all yet:
Read, learn, and enjoy:

• A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L'Engle 
• The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis 
• Bridge to Terabithia, Katherine Paterson
• Tuck Everlasting, Natalie Babbitt

• Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler
• Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
• Anthem, Ayn Rand [free gutenberg.org version here]
  
• The Unheavenly City, Revisited, Edward Banfield
• The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis
• That Hideous Strength, C.S. Lewis
  
• Little Brother, Cory Doctorow [free creative commons version here]
  
• 1984, George Orwell
• Animal Farm, George Orwell
• Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
  
• We, Eugene Zamyatin
• The Martian Way, Isaac Asimov
• Freehold, Michael Z. Williamson
• Ted, White, and Blue, Ted Nugent