BASKING AND BAKING: mustard please?

Braised Pork Chop in Sweet Apple Mustard and Allegedly Healthy Potato and Green Bean Salad!

I get junk mail like you wouldn't believe. Catalog this, catalog that, credit card offers, and recently Omaha Steaks? I haven't had too much experience with Omaha Steaks, I've heard they're good and the delivery bit is a huge bonus this time of year, especially since its snowing here again! We'd actually had an Omaha Steaks dinner over Christmas break with the In-laws, so J and I decided to try them out. For the relatively low price of 66 bucks (that included shipping), we got 4 steaks, 4 pork chops, 2 stuffed fish, 4 chicken breasts, something like 12 burgers, 8 hot dogs and 4 baked potatoes (there may be more, I can't remember). Needless to say, when the large cooler arrived we had to do some serious freezer rearranging.

We tried out some of the pork chops the other night with a great Sweet Apple Mustard glaze and they were great! I found this jewel of a recipe to make as well - I was clearly in a mustard mood.

The pork chop recipe only took 35 minutes, so I started with the potatoes first.

Roast potatos with green beans and bacon
~~serves 4~~ just for 2!

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Ingredients
~~6 kipfler potatoes, halved lengthways~~ 5-6 baby yukon gold potatoes, sliced into thin wafers

4 rashers bacon, chopped (I took this mean 4 pieces of bacon?) I used 2 and had plenty.

100g green beans, trimmed and blanched - I had a small bunch leftover from another dinner so I used what I had, thought it was going to be a bit too much but we devoured the whole thing!

I had never blanched green beans before, but its easy! Just boil enough salted water to cover the green beans, toss the beans in when its boiling and let them boil for about 3 minutes. Then remove and put in ice cold water for another 3 minutes and you're all set!

Once you've sliced the potatoes and bacon, put them onto a cookie sheet or baking dish and add the about a tablespoon of olive oil and salt and pepper. Mix well and toss into the oven.

Bake for 40 minutes, or until potatoes and bacon are crisp.

Here is what mine looked like at around 25 minutes. Be sure to flip the potatoes to ensure even crisping!

Mustard dressing:
1/4 cup (60ml) olive oil
1 tblsp white wine vinegar
1 tblsp lemon juice
1 tblsp Dijon mustard

Mix up the dressing while the potatoes are baking, now is a good time to blanch the green beans as well!

I wasn't sure that I could successfully halve the dressing and it still taste as good so I made it as is and only used half on the actual salad. The rest went into my lunch wrap the next day.

Back to the potatoes: Once they're nice and brown remove them from the oven. I let my potatoes drain for a minute on a paper towel before I combined them with the green beans and dressing. That's it!

In depth instructions for the pork chops can be found here. I again halved the recipe for two people and used apple cider instead of apple juice. I also used pork chops without the bone. Don't be afraid to get a little creative with your recipes, chances are they'll turn out great!

Here are the spices that I used, that little mustard we found at Wal-mart and it is seriously good and how wonderful does that rosemary look? One of my goals this Spring is to start a herb garden extraordinaire so I can stop buying all the little boxes of spices and use my own!

I never use my nice white bowls to mix things, but all my clear bowls were dirty. I love how well the white shows off the mixture! When I started looking around at homegoods, back when I first moved into my own place, I really wanted some fantastic colored set of dishes - now I'm so happy that I went with my white Ikea-ware. Nothing shows off the vivid colors of food quite like a nice white plate!