The nice thing about eating at home

Winter holidays started Friday for me and it feels great to be taking a break from work. This Saturday was a hotpot party with some friends, Sunday I had a chance to check out a Capoeira (a type of Brazilian martial / dance art) where there were some very excellent performances and then spent the day doing some errands, then to come home and cook some pork chops.

I got a great deal on these pork chops, 4 slabs for about $5 so not all meat in Japan is that expensive. The only thing that can get pretty pricey over here is the beef. If you want chicken, pork or fish, then you're in for a treat.

It's been a while since I did any real cooking. The limitation being time and I don't have a kitchen in my room, not that I let the lack of a kitchen stop me. A good hot plate, which costs about $50 here does a very good job of cooking meat or even for a hot pot. The other reason is that I'll be going on a trip for the next 4 days and it wouldn't be a good thing if the food in the fridge went bad.

I bought some spices a while back and spiced up the port as such in the image below and let it rest for about 10~15 mins. The dry rub consisted of coarse pepper, salt, chili powder, basil, rosemary and some 5-spice mix.

The seasoned pork chops looked a little something like this

After that, I had the hot pot at about 230C ish and started cooking. The one nice thing about using a hot plate for doing cooking is the temperature control -- I have a good idea of how hot the plate is by the setting. The biggest problem with cooking dry spiced chops is that if you cook them at too high of a temperature, the spices end up getting burnt and you lose flavor.

After cooking for about 10 mins

The one unfortunate thing about the hot plate is that the one I have doesn't go to a high enough temperature to do a good searing on the meat, just for aesthetic purposes but for consumption purposes, the pork was great.

I served the pork with rice boiled with an assortment of beans and a side of smoked salmon salad, which looks like something below.

Pork steak served with rice and smoked salmon salad

The dinner was great and I ended up having 2 pork steaks for dinner which was absolutely stuffing. I am sure I managed to put some weight on from this dinner. I still got 2 steaks left and will be having them for lunch and dinner tomorrow before I head off to Okinawa. More pictures to follow after I get back!