Stuffed Pork Chops

Cooking time! This time I wanted to make a nice Sunday dinner for the family since we weren't going anywhere. We had some frozen pork chops and I wanted to try something different so I found an interesting recipe to try - stuffed pork chops.

First you make up the stuffing that fills up the pork. So I cut up two slices of rye bread.

Then you need a half a cup of chopped celery. I washed three stalks, guessing that's how much it would take, but after chopping only one I had all the celery I needed.

Next you need a half cup of chopped onion.

And then a half cup of diced dried apples. When I set out to make this, I thought we had plenty of dried apples left from our fruit drying this summer, but when I checked it seems someone ate them all. So earlier in the week I cut up an apple and dried it so I would have some ready. If you don't have a dehydrator you can just buy some dried apples.

Put all that stuff in a bowl and thrown in some thyme.

Pour in some chicken broth.

And stir it all together.

Then the hardest part. Cut slits in your pork chops to make pockets. I hate this because you have to handle the meat a lot so you don't cut all the way through and I HATE touching raw meat. 

Once you have the pockets cut, stuff your pork chops full of the stuffing.

While you're stuffing the chops, have a little oil heating up in a frying pan. Put the chops in to brown them. Then flip and brown the other side. Have fun trying to keep the stuffing from falling out when flipping over...I sure did.

Once they are properly browned, transfer to a baking dish and bake for fifteen minutes to finish cooking them.

While they were baking in the oven, I used my extra celery and made a tasty little side dish. Mmm...peanut butter.

When the time is up, you're done cooking and it's time to eat!

They were pretty good. Brigham loved them, but since I'm not a huge stuffing fan I thought they were only decent. I wanted to leave the stuffing out, but without the stuffing the pork would be pretty blah. If you didn't have a bit of stuffing in the same bite as the pork, the flavor was pretty lacking. I think if I make it again I will marinate or season the actual pork chops before using them.

It was nice that after making just a little stuffing for this dish, I had enough of the ingredients left over that I was able to make a big batch of stuffing as a side dish for another dinner later that week.

It was a filling, nice Sunday night family dinner that wasn't too hard to make. I give it three out of five stars.

If you want to attempt to make it yourself, here is the recipe.