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Tasty Crock-Pot Apple Butter Pork Chops
A few people have asked for this recipe, so here it is:
- 3 large butterfly chops
- 2 golden delicious apples
- 1 8 oz jar apple butter
Place chops in bottom of crock pot. Peel, core and slice thinly the apples. Place slices on top of pork chops. Empty apple butter jar on top of apple slices. Smear around to even it out. Cover and cook on low all day (about 8 hours or so).
It’s good to make some instant stuffing, and layer this dish. A serving is half a butterfly chop, with a few of the apples on top, topped with a bit of stuffing. Cornmeal stuffing is especially good.
Me, Fancy Fast Food, and the AP
I was interviewed for a story on Fancy Fast Food a while back,
This used to be a Subway footlong.
“I would never make any of the things they put on there,” said Ted Carnahan, a seminarian from Sterling, Ill., who follows Fancy Fast Food on Facebook. Carnahan keeps up with the site for amusement, not for recipes.
“It kind of points out the extreme low quality of a lot of fast food meals and how, with a little effort, you could do better.”
Fancy Fast Food
Tuesday I was interviewed by Michael Hill from the Associated Press. Apparently I’m quite the celebrity! Okay, okay, that’s not true – it’s actually something of a fluke that I was contacted about this interview. I am on Facebook (and, by the way, if you’re on Facebook please feel free to look me up and add me as a friend) and am listed as a fan of a website called “Fancy Fast Food.”
Basically, they take a complete fast food meal and manipulate it into something resembling gourmet food. Here’s an example recipe for Fondue du Sept-Onze:
Go to a gas station and buy some cheesy nachos, a couple of hot dogs, and some Sprite. Take it home, save the nacho cheese, soften the tortilla chips in a steamer basket, and cut up the hot dogs and buns into little pieces. Wrap the softened chips around the little pieces of hot dog, and lay the little “sausages” and pieces of bread on a fancy plate. Then scrape the nacho cheese into a fondue pot and heat it up – voila, fondue and “champagne!”
So we chatted about why I liked the site – short answer: It’s funny – and he said that he’ll probably quote me in the article. It should run sometime later this month.
Happy 4th Anniversary (to us!)
Jennifer and I celebrated our 4th wedding anniversary tonight. I took a picture to commemorate the occasion:
Ted and Jennifer
We went out to dinner at Taiko in Dubuque, which was a lovely time if very slow (we were the only ones in the restaurant when we arrived!). The food was delicious, though, and we had a table and a chef to ourselves. Very entertaining, too.
After dinner we went out to get Culver’s and pick up some Christmas groceries, and when we got home, Jennifer realized that she was missing a lens from her glasses. So we drove all the way back to Asbury Hy-Vee and found the lens on the ground underneath a car!
So yes, all things considered, it has been a nice anniversary. Here’s to many more! (71 more, perhaps?)
Catfish Charlies
Just took dinner tonight at Catfish Charlies. They’ve got an awesome Friday night all-you-can-eat special: fried cod, beans, cole slaw, rolls, and french fries for $8 or so per person. It was really good – try it if you’re in Dubuque.
Going the Extra Mile
Jennifer and I stopped a few days ago at Backyard Burgers for a quick dinner, and were behind two people ordering for what I can only guess was a big party or a lot of coworkers. Their bill came to $100, so no wonder it took a while to get everything ordered and prepared. There was a long line forming behind us, but it didn’t seem to me like anyone was in a big hurry. Nevertheless, the manager came around to several of the tables while we were waiting for our food to be brought out and offered us coupons for free burgers to make up for the wait. I wasn’t all that irritated, but that manager definitely went out of his way to make things right, and we appreciated it.
I think that the church can learn from that. We can either put our heads down, do the minimum we can get away with, and be mediocre, or we can go the extra mile by doing our best, putting others first, and trying to make things right when we fail.
More like Wretched Burrito
Jennifer and I tried really bad food from Red Burrito the other day. I ordered a burrito combo, but instead I got what tasted like leftover burger meat (Red Burrito is co-branded with Hardee’s) wrapped in a dried-out tortilla. It came with plastic beans with cold cheese on top, and some very disagreeable “spanish rice.” It was served with love in a styrofoam to-go container which had the lid ripped off (and in the process, they managed to rip the styrofoam all the way down to the table — mmm, sanitary).
It gets worse. Jennifer ordered “nachos.” It’s very important for you to notice the scare quotes around “nachos.” I generally define nachos, at a minimum, as having chips with cheese on them. There was no cheese on these nachos. When we asked the people at the counter about the cheese, they said that they were out of it. How did the cold cheese get on my beans, then? Edit: They were out of guacamole too. Some nachos!
Red Burrito? More like Wretched Burrito.
Mmmm… goat cheese
Before this morning, I was uninitiated in the ways of tasty goat cheese. Then I combined a HyVee “everything” bagel (sadly unimpressive) with Herb Goat Cheese from Goatsbeard Farm at the Columbia Farmer’s Market. The results were quite excellent, but I think next time I’ll go for a tub (which is spready-er) instead of a round (which is crumbly-er).
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