Pork Chops in Creamy Mushroom Sauce

Currently Cooking out of The Carefree Cook by Rick Rodgers.

The next cookbook under the microscope is The Carefree Cook by Rick Rodgers. The book is aimed at people who don’t have a lot of time to cook, but want great tasting food. As he says in his introduction, “The Carefree Cook is about how to get fantastic flavors in your everyday cooking with a minimum of effort.”

Rodgers’ book covers everything from soups and salads to side dishes and desserts. Most of the recipes have fewer than 5 steps and contain easy-to-find ingredients, a boon to busy cooks.

The first recipe that I tried (and one of the first I ever marked to try) was pork chops in a creamy mushroom sauce. Bryan loves mushrooms and we both love pork. There was no way this recipe was going to fail. The dish came together fast, just as Rodgers promised. First you brown the pork chops, then saute mushrooms and shallots (I used onions). You use sherry and chicken broth to deglaze the pan and then add the pork chops back in to finish cooking. At the end, sour cream and cornstarch are stirred into the mixture to thicken it.

The only tricky ingredient was a porcini powder that was listed as optional. Lucky for me, I came across this stuff during a stopover at Whole Foods in Portland, OR. I’m not sure exactly what it is, but I’m assuming it’s dried porcini mushrooms that have been ground to a powder. It thickened the sauce and added a deep, earthy mushroom flavor.

I served the pork chops and sauce over white rice with a side of roasted broccoli. This stuff was good, as in lick-the-plate-clean good. The only bad thing about it? There’s only enough leftovers for one person . . .