Every week we’ll post a recipe that we both made. This week’s recipe was Pork and Corn Stuffing Bake, found over at AllRecipes. 

Robyn’s take:

This week, after Fred looked through my pile o’ recipes and turned up his nose at every one of them, I threw up my hands and said “Okay, goddamnit, YOU pick one, you picky motherfucker!” So he communed with his best friend Google and sent me a link to this recipe, and I sent it on to Nance, who had no problems with it, and thus that is how this week’s recipe was chosen.

I thought that Fred had carefully considered the recipe before suggesting it, but as it turned out, he glanced at it and was all “I like cornbread stuffing! I like Cream of soups! Done and done!” So the entire time I was making the pork chops, he kept wandering in and questioning each step until I wanted to stab him in the eye.

That said, it was a pretty simple recipe. The ingredients are as such:

Pepperidge Farm Cornbread or Herb Seasoned Stuffing (or, to be honest, I’m sure ANY kind of stuffing would do), Cream of Celery soup, whole kernel corn (the recipe calls for 1/2 c., but when I froze corn last summer, I did it in 1-cup servings, so that’s how much I used), onion, celery, pork chops, brown sugar (not pictured) and spicy brown mustard (I used Dijon).

About the pork chops: we have tons of pork chops here, since we grow our own pigs and thus always have plenty of pork in the freezer. The recipe called for boneless pork chops, but I’m not one for deboning pork chops when you can just cook them with the bone in and eat around them. That’s just the kind of wild party girl I am!

Like I said, this was a simple recipe. The hardest part was finely chopping the celery and onion. But I have a super awesome tool to help me do the fine chopping. A few years ago, my mother sent me a Vidalia Chop Wizard, and I’ve been using it ever since. I use it to chop lots of stuff – onions, tomatoes, potatoes, and in this case, celery. All I had to do for the onion was skin the onion and then slice it, put it on the Vidalia Chop Wizard, lower the top, and voila! Finely chopped onions.

I did the same with the celery.

After the celery and onion is chopped, it’s just a matter of tossing the dry stuffing into a bowl and adding the condensed cream of celery soup, onion and celery, and corn. Then you stir ’til it’s reasonably combined, like such:

Take a pie dish, spray it with cooking spray, dump the stuffing mix into the pie dish, and spread it evenly. Top with the pork chops. Mix your brown sugar and mustard, and brush the pork chops with that.

Then stick it into the oven and cook for half an hour. Now, here’s a note: pork chops with bones need to cook a bit longer, apparently. After ours had cooked for 30 minutes,Fred and I got our pork chops and sat down, and his pork chop wasn’t completely done.

Nothing makes me want to run around screaming like underdone pork. Because, BLEH. So we cooked everything for an additional ten minutes, and that was perfect.

(We eat green beans as a side pretty often, because we grow a metric ton of them every year.)

The verdict? Two thumbs up from both of us! The pork chops were really good with their sugar/ mustard glaze, and the stuffing was nice and moist. The onion and celery was a bit crunchy, which I like – but if you prefer yours uncrunchy, probably 2 – 3 minutes in the microwave before you add them to the stuffing mix would take the crunch out.

Fred said that the meal was good enough that he’d like to have it again (which is a good thing, since we have leftovers and will be eating it again for dinner Monday night), though he thinks (and I agree) that Cream of Mushroom soup would be perfectly good. I believe that pretty much any kind of Cream of soup could be substituted for any other; we keep the Cream of Mushroom on hand, so that’s what I tend to use.

Also, of note: Kim was kind enough to share her celiac-friendly make-your-own cream of anything soup mix, here (thanks, Kim!).

Like I said, we’ve got plenty of pork chops in the freezer, so I’ll definitely be making this again – though I think that next time, instead of using a pie dish, I’ll use a 9×13 Pyrex dish. Some of the pork chops were overlapping, and that’s probably part of the reason they didn’t cook all the way through in 30 minutes.

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Nance’s take:  

Fucking Fred (shush, it’s an endearment, sometimes).  When I heard he was picking out the recipe this time I knew in my heart it was going to involve some kind of pork (Mr. Fred and I sometimes share a brain and it is not always a good thing).  I was appalled when I saw cornbread stuffing, but I figured I had signed up to try new things (even if they did make me barf) so I went with it.

A little FYI about Nance.  I freaking hate pork chops.  With a bloody passion.  I have no idea why, but they are just a cut of meat that does absolutely nothing for me – so, of course, I must hate them!  God forbid, I dislike something and not be all dramatic about it!

I really don’t like typing these entries up on the night before they go up, but I’ll be honest by saying that I avoided this recipe like the plague (note: hate pork chops).  I was making this meal up on Sunday afternoon and already had plans to order a pizza for the evening – just in case things didn’t work out (see: hate pork chops).  Thank God I have my husband as a witness because I know that Fred would never believe me, but we could not find Pepperidge Farm stuffing at the store.  With the additional bonus of not being able to find any cornbread stuffing!  (see: Win for the Pittsburgh Yankees, hee).  I ended up substituting Stove Top stuffing, pork flavored, which I considered to be sorta kinda “herbed”, maybe?  Oh, things were not looking so great for me and this recipe.  It was looking even worse when I realized at the last hour that I had no Cream of Celery soup.  I actually had Rick run to the store for it because I already felt bad about the stuffing situation.

Check out this stuffing.  Gross, huh?  I mean, yuk.  When I was in my early 20s I used to love this shit, but as I grew older my taste buds got a little more refined (although corn dogs are still one of my favorite foods so apparently I am not only overly dramatic, but a liar as well). Refined my ass.

DO NOT DO WHAT I DID HERE! I screwed up BIG TIME and pre-made the stuffing. What do I know of recipes that involve packaged stuffing? NOTHING. So I made it up like the package said because Robyn was a little too slow in my her email reply and THIS WAS NOT THE WAY TO DO IT. And I wish I would have added more corn like Robyn did, but I was TRYING TO FOLLOW THE RECIPE, AHEM.

SO yeah, kinda looks shitty, but I’m hoping for the best. You can tell by the way I was getting fancy with the laying of the pork chops. Around here, we don’t have pigs in our backyard so I just went to the local grocery store and bought them since I’m rich. I’m not going to lie. The rule about following the recipe went out the window and I totally didn’t measure the mustard/brown sugar. It just didn’t seem like enough (says she who hates pork chops and will do anything to try and make it more likable). It’s about this time that we were leaning towards taco pizza. Our local Fox’s makes a fabulous one.

This was at 30 minutes. And I thought maybe I should just rename it pork chop soup and call it a day. I am all paranoid about pork being under cooked (my mother loves to pass on her Crazy and it’s one of the reasons I usually eat pork and chicken in a petrified state) so I put it in for another 10 minutes. Honestly? I was hoping that the “soup” would dry out a bit.

Here’s my plate. Please note the spoon. Just sayin’!

I was busy doing other things so I just yelled for my kid to come down and get some food. He slopped it on his plate like this (he had never seen anything like it before) and I cracked up when I saw it. Tell me that doesn’t look like a pile of BARF right there. I was rolling. And debating what time we should call to order the pizza.

THE BEST PART OF ALL?

It was motherfucking delicious! 3 out of 4 loved it and the other one (who hates mustard) only liked the pork chop (which had the mustard on it, go figure). Rick was the lone dissenter, but I bet he would change his mind if I made it with my own stuffing.

So kudos to the FredMonster for picking out a good recipe and giving me absolutely nothing else to bitch about today.