taking liberties with relish

it's just past midnight and i'm sitting down after spending the past six and a half hours running around the kitchen. i'm tired, but it's a good tired; i've ended the day having made a nice diagram in illustrator, fed five people an excellent dinner, and of course, since it's wednesday, i watched project runway.

lauren and i had planned on making dinner this week, and she left the menu up to me. this is an exciting fact because this is the first time i've actually planned a menu with days to spare - the past several days, i've just been picking stuff out at the supermarket. i'm not sure how i came up with the idea of a relish - and i use this term loosely - but it was probably the combination of two things: one, our current obsession with fresh corn; and two, the thought of pork chops and the first thick-cut pork chop i ever had. i don't remember how old i was - either in middle school or early high school - but my parents took my sister and i out to dinner with them and my dad's boss. we went to the vault, which is near government center and has since gone out of business. this was also the first nice restaurant i'd ever been to, with the whole crumb-scraping deal, dark colors and leather and wood. the pork chop i happily ate definitely had some kind of relish on it, where by relish - lauren and i discussed this - i mean something between a garnish and a salad. it's something full of diced things, and is probably kind of crunchy.

so now we come to my relish. well, i had decided on thick-cut pork chops (not on the bone - the supermarket didn't have exactly what i wanted), so for the relish, i thought we'd do corn, onions, tomatoes, squash, and thyme. for a starch we'd do more onions, some butter and thyme, and pasta, with a side of roasted broccoli (because this is the easiest way to cook broccoli). and for dessert, a chocolate cake with the rhubarb-ginger jam i'd made a couple days ago, and whipped cream. i thought about making a trifle, but it was too much work - the past week or so, i've been really exhausted from work for no reason. so i envisioned a chunk of cake, dolloped liberally with jam and then cream.

i didn't really have a set plan of how to go about making dinner, so i started with the cake. then i moved onto vegetables; we did the onions with the thyme, sauteed the zucchini until it was al dente, and tossed them together with raw corn, diced tomatoes (fresh, because diced tomatoes from a can are only useful for pasta sauce), salt and pepper. then i did the pork chops in the skillet, 9 minutes per side. in truth, i should have trimmed them so they were prettier and cooked more evenly, but i was tired at that point and just went with it. they did brown nicely, though, especially in the all-clad skillet (i knew there was a reason why i bought it besides pure vanity regarding its physical beauty), which made quite a nice gravy. i was, as i had said, feeling a little lazy so i just deglazed the pan with some port wine, added a little chicken stock, and then dumped in the leftover gravy from the pot pie we made a couple days ago. let me tell you, rubbing your pork chops with salt and pepper before you brown them makes a huge difference. that was a good sauce if i say so myself.

dessert ended up being a sundae type of affair, where i made a bunch of stuff and let people choose what they wanted. the chocolate cake was pretty good, if uninspired (i used richard sax's recipe, since i knew the man can't go wrong). to go with it, we had the rhubarb-ginger jam and whipped cream, but i also had bought some plums, so we macerated those in sugar and cointreau, and then i made some hot fudge. for someone who grew up on hershey's syrup and packaged hot fudge, real hot fudge - which is really easy to make - is a dream. a lovely, happy, sunny one. i had mine with everything but the plums, and it was quite good.

and now the kitchen is spotless, the trash has been taken out, and the dishwasher is running - i guess putting the oven on the clean cycle will have to wait until tomorrow. oh, before i go...i was looking at chocolate cake recipes online, and i found one for a "deconstructed black forest cake." well, dear readers, i heartily disapprove of deconstructed food. i mean, if i wanted to eat all of the components separately, i'd do that. but when i eat a black forest cake, i want to eat a black forest cake, not a chocolate cake with stuff on the side. honestly - would you want to eat a deconstructed sandwich? there's a logic to a layer cake like there's a logic to a sandwich - the point being the combination of things. someone put those flavors together because they're good together, as opposed to separately. hmph. i question the people who make "open-faced ravioli" - isn't the point of ravioli that it's this little pillow of pasta that encloses something good? yeah. presumably you might want to know what exactly is in your pasta or your layer cake, but that's what a cookbook is for.