So I haven’t written all month in this space, and only once last month, and the last time that happened I decided to call it a “break” and then come back on a semi-regular schedule of two blogs with recipes every month.
This “break” doesn’t feel like that one. I am not sure what’s happening, but it seems easiest to blame it on the upcoming Year of the Pig, my year (I am a metal Pig), which says that this year is going to be not so rosy for Pigs in general. Not Year of the Snake devastating (2013) – just generally not the best.
Proof of impending doom: this new WordPress update which has made hyperlinking text nearly impossible for me to decode. Technology is THE WORST.
But I digress.
I am not sure what direction I am heading vis-a-vis this little old life of mine. I finished a novel of dubious quality in November and attended a writing retreat at Cacapon State Park in December (my first, and a revelation on a number of different levels). Both of these events, in conjunction with a slight tapering off of my (paid) mercenary writing work, have conspired to make me more interested in spending more time considering my own creative life. Not necessarily fiction, but something of my own, whether it’s writing or painting.
For over a year now there has been a bubbling of some idea in the background of my brain, and I can’t quite place my finger on it. I spend a lot of time sitting around, thinking, but I also spend a lot of time, sitting around on social media, and I think that has really dulled my brainpan’s ability to pick up on the finer ideas that are floating around. There is a pattern to my social media usage (it increases when I am feeling disconnected, which increases my feeling of disconnection, ironically, and if I was a person who ate their feelings I would have ballooned to epic proportions in the last six months, but thankfully I am not, as menopause approacheth, I think, and I cannot handle having the Menopausal Muffin Top at the same time I am trying figure out some shit regarding What It All Means and Why Am I Even Here).
Again, digression. But if you are staring down the barrel of 48 years of age (March 14th, if you’d like to order something early. I prefer travel, domestic is fine, and it needn’t be first class. Thanks.), these are some of the things you might be worrying about, too:
- How you spend your days when you can spend them (mostly and within reason) in any manner you would choose.
- What you might want to create.
- Why you might continue to bother creating even though one day feels much like the next and you are continually reminded by your culture that you are, for all intents and purposes, mostly already dead anyway (Helen Mirren is the exception, not the rule).
- What on earth you create in the kitchen in the first place when you are now essentially living alone, since your particular friend has moved out (but is still your lovin’ spoonful) and you have no one to cook for anymore, really, even as you had very few people to cook for in the first place. This sounds exceptionally pitiful, but I look at this as a creative issue more than a personal one. Today. Today that’s how I look at it.
And then today I went to yoga – always a good idea – and my lovely teacher Martha read this poem.
Saint Francis and the Sow
The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
Galway Kinnell
What is it about yoga teachers sometimes? This was a perfect reminder, in poetry, that the thing that matters is understanding the long, lovely length of you before anything else.
A powerful and potent reminder on a day when, other than yoga, the only thing I have done is endlessly troll the aforementioned social media while eating a surfeit of cinnamon buns and bacon.
But it’s not enough to just know on the inside something. My current dilemma is what to do with the outside.
I was about to push “publish” on this, and I am sure this blog would have been okay. But as it stood, prior to these next few sentences, it is disingenuous and not unlike all of the other “Oh, woe is me, What ever shall I do with all of my free time?” It’s the same white noise of all the other blog posts, only with maybe more run-on sentences and made-up words.
And maybe this post is still like that, to a large extent. I feel like I am struggling with a bonus mid-life crisis (the first one prompted at 42 by a dead husband, for those of you who have not been playing along thus far), except I have no desire for the typical trappings of that – mostly I want to sell my house, bank the cash, and trade the Subaru in for a van that I can live in.
Is this in the realm of possibility? Yes.
Is this the kind of drastic move that I need to make to figure out the burbling idea in the back of my mind, to forever loose the shackles of the unexamined life that I may be leading? Who knows? As all three regular readers of this blog know, it’s not like my life is unexamined. And it’s not like I haven’t had sudden, life-upending change occur already.
The creative conundrum I also find myself in (who to cook for? What to write? Why write? Who cares?) is an added bonus. It makes the struggle to find meaning in the everyday that much more fraught. And godallahbuddha knows I have had plenty of that fraughtness. #MadeUpWord
So it is with not a little humor that I acknowledge my own failing to recognize the long, perfect loveliness of the sow (Pig) that is me and usher in the Year of the Pig (over a month early) with this stuffed pork chop.
Did I answer the question of What The Hell in this blog post? Not really. But it eases this Pig’s mind to practice a little gallows humor as the darkness of this year comes to a close. Plus, this chop is pretty damn good and would make an excellent New Year’s dinner. Cut it in half to make two if you have no one to cook for, and enjoy the little story of its current incarnation.
Stuffed Porkchop With Spinach, Cherries, and Comté
I haven’t ever been pork’s biggest fan. Part of this is due to the fact that I was raised by nearly-Jewish vegetarians, and pork was not part of the regular rotation. Mostly it has to do with preparation. All the pork I ate well into adulthood was thin chops, more bone than meat, fried to within an inch of its life and served without sauce next to an arid bed of rice or other grain.
I drank a lot of water to get those chops down.
That all changed when I met Dorlene Olsen. Dorlene was Dane’s grandmother (the dead husband), an outspoken woman who wasn’t shy about sharing her feelings. The first time I met her, she opened up her door, looked me up and down without even attempting tact and said, “Huh. I thought you were blonde.”
Not an auspicious beginning, and although it was rough going many times with her and me, I always admired the way she cooked. She was the type of cook who didn’t use a recipe, just threw together ingredients and made something delicious. Her food wasn’t fancy, just plentiful and always mouth-watering. The one Thanksgiving I spent with her at the helm was filled with confusion, drunkenness, and one or two joints for the cooks. Dinner didn’t make an appearance until 9:30 p.m., by which time I was faint with hunger and ready for bed, but when it came to the table everyone dug in.
Aside from pecan pie, one of Dorlene’s specialties was the stuffed pork chop. I had never heard of such a thing, but once I tasted it I was sold. Dorlene stuffed hers with homemade bread stuffing, but I have lightened it up just a bit here with tart Northwest cherries in her honor and Comté cheese and spinach that she probably would have disliked on principle.
Spend money for the best chops you can buy; local, pasture-raised, heritage-bred, and organically farmed pork makes all the difference here.
Ingredients
1 cup tart dried cherries
½ cup Comté cheese, diced small
4 tablespoons cold butter, cut into small cubes
10 ounces fresh spinach, washed, thicker stems removed, and roughly chopped
¼ teaspoon salt
Freshly cracked black pepper
4 thick, center cut pork chops with no bone
4 tablespoons butter (for searing)
1 sprig rosemary
Optional Sauce: 1 sprig thyme, 1 finely chopped shallot, ½ cup chicken stock or white wine, 1 tablespoon butter.
Method
Preheat oven to 350⁰. This is where an oven thermometer will come in handy. If your oven is colder, it will take the chops forever to cook.
In a small bowl, combine the cherries, Comte, butter, spinach, salt, and pepper.
With a sharp knife, cut a slit in the pork chops like you are making a little pocket for the stuffing (which is, in fact, exactly what you are doing).
Divide filling evenly among the four pork chops. Season both sides of the chop well with salt and pepper. You should be able to see salt and pepper flecks.
Heat butter and rosemary in a large, oven-proof skillet (cast iron works really well here). When the pan is hot, add the pork chops and sear without moving, about three minutes. Flip and sear the other side, then move skillet to the preheated oven. Cook until the chop reaches an internal temperature of 135⁰, and then move chops to a cutting board to rest for at least five minutes. The carryover heat will cook the chop to a perfect 145⁰.
Should you require a simple sauce, return the skillet to the heat and use a wooden spoon to scrape the bits from the bottom of the pan. Pour off any extra fat (not all of it; some fat is good) and remove the rosemary, then stir in one chopped shallot and a sprig of thyme. Add ½ to one cup of chicken stock or wine and stir as the sauce comes to a boil, reducing the sauce for about five minutes or until it is about half of what you started with.
Remove pan from heat and add a healthy tablespoon of butter. Transfer pork chops to a platter and drizzle sauce over them.
