The recipe opens with the line “Son Jimmy’s favorite pork dish.” It’s things like this that prick my imagination. Who was Jimmy?
He probably wasn’t Jimmy Ray.
I can’t quite imagine Jimmy Ray eating a pork chop topped with apples, maraschino cherries, and brown sugar. But I have a feeling that the Jimmy that these pork chops were named after was a Groovy Teen. How could he not be?
I originally made this recipe in the fall when my apples were ripe. If you don’t know about my apple trees, you can find out more about them here and here. I made so many apple recipes at the time, but figured that you may not want to read about nothing but apples, so backlogged this one. 
The pork for this recipe came from the sale bin. I love seeing what is in the reduced meat section of the grocery store. Sometimes there are things like beef shanks or pork neck bones. I love to get those cuts of meat and slowly cook them until they fall off the bone and have made magical gravy to serve over mashed potatoes. Usually I’ll throw some garlic in there to roast. That either gets incorporated into the sauce or spread on homemade bread.
None of which is relevant to this recipe. I only brought it up because I did not have 3/4 inch pork chops. I had tiny little thin cut pork chops because they were on sale. 
That part is important because thin pork chops cook much quicker than thick cut pork chops. Which means that they can overcook quickly if you aren’t watching them. Nobody likes a dry pork chop. To try to mimic the effect of the thicker pork chops, I sandwiched an apple slice between layers of pork. I feel like they were still a little dry, but not too bad. It wasn’t quite that experience of biting into a nicely marbled pork chop on the bone where the fatty edge is just sort of melting into the rest of the meat. (And all the vegetarians that are accidentally reading this are cringing).
This is a solid meat and potatoes sort of dish. It’s sweeter than I like an entree to be, but not so sweet you feel like you need insulin.
Speaking of potatoes…I ran into Target while my husband stayed in the car with the kids (one of whom needed a nap like you wouldn’t believe). While he waited he read an article of genius facts or something like that. When I got back in, he attempted to impress me with the fact that everything in the world could be labelled as a potato or not a potato. Of course I started brilliantly discussing how not everything we label as a potato is actually a potato and yams and sweet potatoes are not the same thing. Then I asked “Would it be a better classification if we labelled everything as “tuber or not tuber?” To which my clever husband replied “That is the question.” I retorted that that wasn’t funny, as I laughed and he snort-laughed next to me. We never fail to amuse ourselves. (If you don’t get why this was not funny, review Hamlet).
And don’t serve sweet potatoes as a side dish for this meat. It’s just too much sweetness. 
By the time this post publishes, I will be on a work trip to Canada. My husband and kids will be home by themselves. Because I’m me, I want to have some things prepared for them to eat before I leave. It’s just easier for everyone if they don’t have to think about it. Plus it makes it less likely that they will default to pizza every night that they aren’t eating boxed macaroni and cheese. My husband is a getting to be a much better cook because he’s had to take over a lot of the initial meal prep with our work schedules, but when the cat’s away, the mice will play. (Which is a really gross cliche to put on a food blog.)
And speaking of making sure my family is taken care of, I decided to take my blog writing on the road today and worked from a coffee shop this morning. The boys are with their dad and we brought the girl with us because she’s been wanting to get back there and play in their super cool kid area. The coffee shop is known as the town’s living room. We chose a table near the kids’ area, got her a muffin and a chocolate milk that she won’t eat or drink until much later because she already had 3 breakfasts and really just wanted to play. There were a couple of women sitting at table near us. One of them was slightly younger than the other, but if someone had said that they both had grandchildren, I wouldn’t be surprised. Except, I kind of feel like neither of them had ever had kids since they started loudly talking about how terrible we are for bringing our child to a coffee shop and not spending time with her. One of them looked like an old church lady. She would lean forward and whisper something to her companion who would comment outloud about how neglectful we are. It makes me crazy. I feel the need to justify myself and my choices. But it doesn’t matter. They wouldn’t get it. And now they are talking about child psychology. I just can’t even.
When we read literature about Russia and Poland, we think of foods like cabbage rolls and borscht. (See what I did there? Linked the two thoughts) Cold weather vegetables that store well. Which makes this whole recipe make a lot more sense. So put on your fur coat, study up on a little Boris and Natasha and get ready for this recipe.
From a very early age, I loved a good mystery. More often than not, the books I have checked out in Overdrive are mysteries. The really good ones have twists that you never see coming. The silly ones are fairly obvious from early on and I spend most of the book waiting for the characters to catch up to where I already am.There was one book I read a few years back where the main character knew who the killer was by asking for them for an answer to a cryptic crossword. I was confounded at the time, but have since learned to do cryptics. Not nearly as well as my friend that takes existing crossword puzzles and then writes his own clues to the answers. Also, not nearly as well, as our other friend who just has the sort of brain that overthinks everything (Yes, mom, even worse than I do.) I do best when I have someone else with whom I can discuss the possibilities. 
I am usually pretty good at sussing out secrets. Not always to my benefit. Occasionally, though, there are things that I just never see coming. Like when my half-brother became my half-sister. Never saw that coming.
This recipe was an easy one. It just didn’t have a title. Or instructions. It’s probably a good thing that the thing I like to read best after mysteries is cookbooks. Yep. Just read them like novels. It’s a great way to see how ingredients are supposed to go together and which foods pair well with other foods. It gives you an idea of the culture and values of populations. Shows you how much time people have to cook or bake. It’s an anthropological study (read: mystery). 
10 Cents Worth of Dates 