Pork chops

Eastside Road, January 26, 2011—

CURIOUS THING: this is a favorite dinner of ours; we used to have it five or six times a year; yet it's years since last we made it. Here's what you do:

In a mortar, crush raw peeled garlic cloves (perhaps previously crushed) with a good quantity of whole fennel seeds and some salt. Cover the resulting paste, which will be coarse, with olive oil.

You salted the pork chops when you got them home, right? And refrigerated them loosely wrapped in their butcher-paper until time to broil them?

Get them out of the icebox, spread one side with half the fennel paste, and broil until that side's done. Turn them, spread the other side with the remaining paste, and broil until done.

Sometimes I sprinkle the chops with lemon juice before spreading on the fennel paste; last night I forgot.

I don't know where the recipe came from. We've made it for years: I recognize the label-paper and calligraphy on the fennelseed jar from the time I was studying calligraphy informally with David; that would be in the early 1960s. As to what what this is called, I suppose it's a kind of fennelseed pesto, but that would be misleading. It's delicious on pork, broiled or roasted.

With it, we had these oven-roasted potatoes with a few whole cloves of garlic, salt, pepper, and rosemary. Green salad, of course.

Cheap Pinot grigio