Whisk Wednesdays: Côtes de Porc Flamande (Baked Pork Chops with Potatoes and Thyme)

        The recipe prepared for this week is from Class 20, Part 3: Côtes de Porc Flamande (Baked Pork Chops with Potatoes and Thyme).  It can be found in the cookbook Le Cordon Bleu At Home on pages 106-107.  

      The photo of this week's plate shows Matt's plate as CC keeps emailing me telling me that these plates I feature have way too little food on them and that certainly I am starving my guys with these "Barbie" portions.  As you can see, Matt's plate shows ample nutrition and amounts of food!   

      This week's recipe was very easy and used only two pans!  We buttered the baking dish, put in a layer of sliced potatoes, placed browned pork chops over the potatoes, layered another round of potatoes, doused it with a little melted butter, salt, pepper, and thyme, and into the oven it went at 400 degrees for 40 minutes.  How much easier could it possibly be than this?   

      The guys loved it, definitely a successful recipe.  I liked it okay, but I am not that fond of greasy things, and this was a little greasy if you ate the potatoes from the layer underneath the pork chops, as the pork chop juices dripped onto the potatoes (which is why the guys LOVED them), and made them just a little too fatty for my taste.    The potatoes on the top layer, however, were nice and tasty.   

      The recipe called for portions of 6-8 ounces of pork chop each, so that is what I purchased, with the bone-in.   This amount of pork chop is probably fine for a husband who absolutely loves pork chops and a son who swims 5 hours a day...for all others, one of that size would feed two easily. 

      All in all, a very nice recipe, and since Mark liked it so much, I would probably make it a few times a year for him.  Important (and fun) to keep the man happy, you know!   

      If you would like to see how the other Whisk Wednesday members fared in this class, click here, and then on the Whisk Wednesdays connect to individual bloggers, or better yet, come and join us!  Shari has the ingredients posted on her site at the click, so while we can't post the recipe instructions, you can at least look at the ingredients, and I bet you can figure out a lot of it from there. 

      Next week's assignment is:   

Class 21 Les Poissons – Fish
• Class 21, Part 1 (Post on Wednesday, January 28, 2009):
Truite aux Amandes (Trout with Almonds) pages 49-50