Cookbook Project, Book #31

[ladysprite]

"Taste of Home 2007 Recipe Collection"

I subscribed to Taste of Home Magazine for more years than I can remember - it used to be a pretty decent magazine, full of practical and useful recipes. It wasn't haute cuisine, admittedly; they never shied away from recipes that used Velveeta or tortilla chips. But they did their best to focus on food that made sense for middle-income, busy people to make on a day-to-day basis, and for a long time I wound up finding at least one recipe I could use in each issue. Recently they utterly changed their content enough that I dropped my subscription, but their back issues are useful. I found this compilation at a secondhand bookstore, and it's a lot more convenient than pawing through half a dozen issues, if only for the index.

I had some pork chops in the freezer from the last Cookbook Project experiment with stuffed chops, and I saw a recipe in the book that sounded simple but good, so late last week I wound up making Lemon Pecan Pork Chops.

I am impressed. It was a pathologically easy recipe, it was made entirely from ingredients I had in my pantry, and it tasted delicious. This is useful both as a good dinner and as a fallback for nights when I don't have the time or the creativity for big-deal dinner preparation.

I'm happily surprised that this project isn't utterly shattering me financially....

Comments

[bess.livejournal.com]

mmmm sounds yummy.

[ladysprite.livejournal.com]

Take pork chops (we used thick-cut). Rub them with lemon pepper and garlic salt. Saute them in a little bit of butter, about 8 minutes on each side. Remove them from the pan, toss in some chopped pecans, and deglaze it with lemon juice. Serve the chops with the lemon-pecan sauce over them.

[vettecat.livejournal.com]

I haven't picked that up lately... how has the content changed?

(Reminds me, I should get those magazines back from you eventually...)

[ladysprite.livejournal.com]

They're no longer ad-free, is the biggest change. In fact, they're now about 30-40% ads - the last issue I looked at, the first actual recipe was somewhere around page 11.

And in addition to the ads, they're stuffed with a lot of filler, most of it propaganda for their online store or other products they shill. And the recipes they do have are getting more and more useless (a suggestion for how to decorate pre-purchased cupcakes to look like baseballs is *not* a recipe), and at least a handful of them are repeats from earlier issues. Overall, it's just become a lot more about glossy pictures and self-promotion, and a lot less about useful food.

(Oh, geez, I had utterly forgotten - I'm so sorry! I'll look at my schedule, and figure a time we can come over and drop them by, and meet the new kitties?)

[vettecat.livejournal.com]

Oh, ick. That's a shame, it used to be a nice magazine. Thanks for the alert, though.

And I've been meaning to ping you about finding a time to get together anyway, but at this point it might be best to wait 'til after Passover (mid-April)... how far ahead do you like to plan?