Pork Chops and Donuts

Yesterday, David worked from home because I had a doctor appointment (they told me that they counted the weeks wrong and my c-section makes more sense at 41 one weeks so now it is the 22nd--less than a week!). On these days, I find it easiest to make slow cooker recipes because then I can guarantee he is home (not stuck in traffic or at work) when it's ready. I know they can stay on warm for a while but I don't like to do that, plus that means eating alone. Plus, we usually have time for a nap when he's work from home because we don't have his hour+ commute. Then when we wake up, dinner's ready. It's really quite convenient.

So I decided on pork chops and something with mushrooms. I found this recipe but I modified it a smidge and I cut it in half (since I was only making two pork chops). If you use fresh mushrooms, be sure to cut the water (or wine) in half since they will let out moisture too. I wanted to keep the sauce as a gravy so I was trying to be very careful about how thick or thin it got. I only used a half of an onion instead of a whole onion (if you were cutting the recipe in half) because that seemed like plenty of onion to me. I also added carrots and red potatoes (but next time I'll add these halfway through because they caused issues with the amount of liquid in the pot and especially the carrots, cooked really fast).

It was really good though! The pork fell apart and you didn't even need to use the side of your fork to cut it. I would definitely eat it again. Since we added so many vegetables, we have some of those leftover that tonight we will serve over quinoa (for the protein--otherwise we'd use rice).

Also last night, David had such a hankering for donuts since we had talked about picking some up after my appointment but ended up not doing so. The weather wasn't the greatest so we didn't really want to go out and buy some (plus buying donuts at night is always risky because they've been out all day. Mornings are really the best time to go). I found a recipe online that uses cake mix, since I didn't want to wait for the yeast to rise in the traditional recipes. Plus, we have box cake mix on hand for some reason (we don't usually). I'm not sure where the recipe people got their cake mix because they ask for 18.25oz of mix but our boxes were only 15.25. However, we decided to make it anyway and adjust from there if it was too liquidy. I'm so glad we waited because they ended up pretty thick as it was. I don't know what that extra 3 oz of mix would've done to it but I don't want to find out!

We don't have a thermometer that went high enough for the oil temp so we had to guess. At first, the oil was definitely too hot and they cooked way too quick. So we turned down the heat (more than we would've guessed was right but they started coming out better) to basically low. We didn't add the sugar at the end (mostly out of laziness I think). Of course they're deep fried so they're going to taste good but they remind me of the ones you get at Chinese buffets. They're good but not quite what I would call a donut. It seemed to get rid of the craving though so mission accomplished!