Pork Chops and Patty Melts

As a former vegetarian, I have no experience cooking meat. Usually, David cooks it (when we have it. We actually cook meatless more times than not) but I needed a break from Baby so I made dinner. On Monday night, we had amazing pork chops! I had to cut the recipe in half since we only made 2 pork chops but that didn't work out well for the spices so I mostly just guessed instead of measuring. I don't know if it was because of this or if the original recipe was like this too but all we could taste was the carmelizing, not the spices. It was still so good though! It was even easy for an inexperienced chef like myself to make! I would definitely make this again. It is a tad annoying that it uses the stove top and the oven but it actually hasn't been too hot here so we haven't had a problem using the oven in a while.

Last night, I made patty melts. I did this slightly different than they did. For instance, I didn't toast the bread in the pan first. We keep our bread frozen so I just microwaved it and I used our regular wheat bread, instead of rye. Then I melted some butter to cook the patties in (didn't use salt or pepper. I thought the cheese would make it salty enough). I also cooked the onions at the same time as the patties. I used red instead of white.

Then I buttered one side of one slice of bread (for each sandwich) and put the non-buttered bread down in the pan. I figured that the grease leftover would be enough for the plain side. Then I added a slice of american cheese, the patty, the onions, shredded mozzarella and then the other slice of bread (buttered side up). I am a pro at making grilled cheese so this was very similar. Even though I had never cooked ground beef before, my patties came out medium-well and that's just the way we like it! This recipe was a bit more time consuming and it involved keeping track of a lot of things at once but it was actually quick (for the average person) and really really really good (probably all that butter!)!