Apple-Pie Pork Chops

By some strange coincidence, there is no supermarket between the store where I pick up my CSA and home. There is a Yes! Organic Market across the street, but their selection of meats is pretty limited, so I usually avoid them. But the other day, I had no idea what I wanted to do for dinner anyway, and I figured I'd go to Yes! and poke around. They had some good looking, relatively cheap pork chops, so I picked them up. 

I wanted some fall flavors, and I still had some crabapple schapps. I know pork chops go well with apples, and it's fall, so time for fall flavors! I've never marinated with alcohol, and I was eager to try: I put a good slug of the schapps in a bag, along with some thyme and some cinnamon, and threw it into the fridge for a few hours.

I was a little worried that it would marinate for too long, and the pork would end up mushy, since it was in the fridge for five hours. It turned out, it may have been a bit longer than ideal, but not too long. I fried the pork chops for about 10 minutes, turning up the heat at the end to get a bit of a sear. I really enjoyed these. The pork was good and tender from the marinade. It was, however, a bit disconcerting to be eating pork that tasted an awful lot like apple pie. If I do this again, I'll marinate for a shorter period of time, and probably not bother with the thyme. It was overpowered by the other flavors, and so a waste of thyme.

Apple Beverage

Image from geekphilosopher.com.

So I've been working on a cocktail that tastes like an apple. It's hard! I started off with Applejack, lemon juice, and Domaine de Canton. The first iteration was quite good, but very, very lemony. I'll post it here sometime. The second was more apple like, but still too lemony, so I switched to lemon vodka. I'll need to fool around a bit more, but the lemon vodka is the right idea, I think. Last night I tried something a bit different -- I threw together lemon vodka, St. Germain, and Applejack. It didn't really work. There might be a good drink in there somewhere, but it's not going to be particularly apple-flavored. This iteration had too much St. Germain, so it mostly tasted like elderflower. I wonder if some dry vermouth might not help some of these recipes?