First the bread. The recipe is entitled “Organic Whole Wheat Sandwich Bread” is one of a number I printed out several years ago (copyright 2007!) when I was developing my own whole-wheat sandwich bread. It’s no longer available on their Web site, so far as I can tell, and my printout doesn’t have a URL I can look up in the Wayback Machine, but the the formula is very similar to one titled “A Smaller 100% Whole Wheat Pain de Mie”, but not baked in a lidded loaf pan, and with more fat. So far as I know, I had never done this recipe before, and it has some good and bad points. On the good side, it’s very soft; the added fat, milk powder, and potato starch all combine to ensure that. On the bad side, it’s very soft, and tears easily when slicing or attempting to spread peanut butter or jam. It’s also quite high-calorie: two thin (½ in or 12 mm) slices add up to 275 kcal (minus a little bit for whatever carbs the yeast ate), compared with similar-sized commercial whole-wheat breads which tip the scale at 220 kcal. On the positive side, with all that carbohydrate it toasts very well, and would probably make a good whole-wheat pain perdu or Texas toast. I probably wouldn’t make it again.

The second is the pork chops. This comes from the “May & June 2018” issue of Cook’s Illustrated (pp. 10–11) and I think it’s the first thing I’ve made from the magazine since Christopher Kimball’s partners fired him as editor-in-chief. I actually didn’t make the magazine version, but rather “Deviled Pork Chops for Two”, an online-only extra based on the four-serving magazine recipe. This was quite simple to do, as it merely involves toasting some panko in melted butter, making a flavorful seasoning paste, and using the latter to glue the former to some pork chops. I found while doing this that I had mistakenly defrosted a pair of strip steaks rather than pork loin chops I thought I had, but luckily, my quarterly meat delivery had brought me some pork sirloin chops that I could speed-defrost in the microwave, and this recipe calls for the sort of low-and-slow cooking that pork sirloin requires. (Unlike the loin, pork “sirloin” is composed of a few different muscles, and does not respond well to fast, high-heat cooking methods like sautéeing.) The recipe is simple enough that I did not bother to enter it as a “recipe” in my nutrition app; I just recorded the pork, mustard, panko, and butter (the four highest-calorie ingredients) individually. Recommended.