Another Visit From The Queen

You all know my passion for recreating from leftovers, and how I have a “friend” who helps with these creations, whom I lovingly call The Queen of Leftovers. The Queen is really just an extension of my creative mind; my imaginary muse, if you will. I call upon this muse when I am creatively thinking of ways to re-use my leftovers. Well, the Queen paid me yet another visit the other day. This time, we cooked up some pork chops with a creamy sauce made from my chorizo and fig sauce. Chorizo With Sweet & Sour Figs

I just hate throwing away food. I will always try my best to re-use and repurpose food as much as I can. I also like to reinvent things, because, well in all honestly, I get bored eating the same things again and again.

For this dish, I marinated the pork in some of the leftover sauce from my chorizo and figs for about 1-2 hours before cooking it. The pork came out very tender and full of flavor, as you would expect. I could have easily left it just like this, but it would have been to similar to the original dish. Now I couldn’t have that, could I? Where would the fun in that be? 🙂

Once I was ready to cook the pork, I seared it in a very hot skillet with a combination of both olive oil and butter for about 2 minutes per side, until it had a nice little crust all around. These were very small pork chops. I only had a few and I had to extend them, so I purposely cut them smaller. Besides, we can all stand to ease up a bit on our portions.

Once the crust was all around the chops, I removed them and kept them warm, then doctored up the sauce a bit. All I did really was add some heavy whipping cream and then reduced it for a bit, and finished it with butter. But it was different enough to be considered a new meal, and a recreation from the
firstover” dish, though just as good, if not even better.

Once the sauce was made, I re-added the porkchops and continued to cook everything for an additional 10-15 minutes, at a low heat until the pork was completely cooked, making sure to stir it every so often. When everything was ready, I served it with some asparagus topped with tomatoes and mushrooms and wild rice and some warmed ciabatta on the side. My tomato-mushroom topping used up the rest of my heirloom tomato salad too. Heirloom Tomato Salad. See EVERYTHING gets re-used and repurposed if I can. Nothing ever goes to waste (my waist yes though) in my kitchen if I can help it. 🙂

Not only do we like to eat our newly created leftovers all the time, but I also like to share them all with you, for inspiration and new ideas that you can use too. Recreating is helpful in many ways, especially in these tough economic times when just going to the grocery store requires us to take out a small loan from the bank each time.

Be fearless and be creative. You just might be surprised at what you can do. Have a great day and make everyday great. Stay safe and stay well. ‘Til next time.