Pork Chop Bake

I didn't really realize that this was going to be an update until after I had made it. However, I was so struck by the simplicity and tastiness that I felt it appropriate to share.

Ingredients:

4	pork chops
1.5 cups	dry rice
10	small tomatoes
1	onion
6	dried hot chili peppers
	broth
	water
	salt
	pepper

Procedure:

Soak the pork chops for a few hours in broth. Then brown them, seasoning heavily with salt and pepper. This is just to make them prettier. You'll be baking them in a bit so you don't have to worry about cooking them through.

Put the rice in the bottom of a glass baking pan. Add to it 2 cups of broth and 1.5 cups of water. Add salt and pepper to taste. Chop the onions and cut the tomatoes into quarters. Put those on top of the rice and add salt and pepper to taste. Throw the hot chili peppers in there too.

Put the pork chops on top of the tomatoes. Cover the pan with foil. Bake at 350 F for 45 minutes, then remove the foil and bake for another 15 minutes. Makes four servings.



For broth I've recently taken to Kitchen Basics vegetable stock. I really like it, as it has a lot of character to it without MSG. It also has no MSG added and no MSG produced through hydrolized vegetable products and all that other nonsense that they're using nowadays to sneak MSG into things while claiming that there's none added. Note that I don't universally avoid MSG; I like chinese takeout and Doritos as much as the next guy. I just prefer to cook without it. It spooks me out a little bit.

As another aside, I'm starting to get skeptical about this technique for the hot dried peppers. It's been claimed to me that if you boil them with something, some of the heat will boil out of them and into the food. I have not found this to be the case.l In the future, if I want to use them, I will crush them and actually add them to the food. For this recipe I would probably use 1 or 2; they're quite hot. Six would be overkill.