Pork Chops with Creamy Mushroom Sage Sauce
Mushrooms. Who doesn’t love them?
On pizza. In soup. On a salad. In a savory sauce to dress up any low-cost meat. This versatile fungi deserves a place in any pantry.
Lately I’ve been wanting to carry more of the cooking load in our household. As you may already know from reading other recipes on this blog, my domestic partner is an incredible cook. I am, by comparison, more inexperienced. My single working mother raised us mostly by microwave, but the few dishes she did cook I left her alone with so I could play more video games in my room. Filled with that naive confidence that all inexperienced youths possess I knew I wouldn’t need any cooking skills, because my plan for adulthood was to live off McDonald’s seven days a week. Once I had my own money there would be no one to stop me from eating my favorite fast food whenever I wanted it. And I would never not want it.
Cut to me at age 21, living on my own with no idea how to cook even the most basic meal, my fast food dreams long expired, and filled with a desire to nourish my body with my own two hands. At first I didn’t stray far from the familiar, buying frozen burger patties and plopping their icy bodies into a pan of hot splattering oil. The first time I did this I was so hungry I figured the best solution was to turn the heat all the way up. The higher the heat, the faster it cooks. A smoky apartment, a black chunk of burger steaming in the sink, and a very annoyed roommate demonstrated the depths of my ineptitude.
Over the years I got better, but, like many men, my range remained limited. I knew how to make a few handfuls of dishes, but venturing outside that comfort zone got harder and harder. Experimentation brought on a lot of anxiety. It felt like a waste of time, a waste of money, and a waste of food to try something new and mess it up. Why bother, when I knew for sure I would like what I could already make?
Now, for the first time, I live with someone who loves to cook and knows what they’re doing and so she does most of it. As a proud feminist I can’t stand this dynamic any longer. This isn’t the 1950s. With both of us out of work due to COVID now is the perfect time to expand my culinary repertoire.
I decided to start with a staple I already knew: meat, then add a little something extra I was less familiar with: mushroom sauce. Every time my partner made mushroom sauce for me I (please forgive the expression) creamed my jeans over it. How could something so simple liven up a familiar food so exquisitely? I looked up a recipe on Simply Recipes for a creamy mushroom sage sauce with chicken and thought, “I wonder how this would go on a pork chop?” Pork chops are always cheap and easy to make, but can be dry and a little bland. What better way to balance that out than with a thick rich sauce to sit in?
All day, from my morning coffee to the grocery store to pick out ingredients to the couple episodes of great Netflix television we watched before dinner, all I could think about was my chance to make a special meal for my special romantic partner.
For a side I wanted some potato wedges so the first thing I did was chop them up and put them in the oven. This recipe is focused on the mushroom sauce and pork chop, so I didn’t include the wedge. If anyone reading this wants that recipe I will post it in the comments.
Start off easy, just finely chopping some shallots. My knife skills aren’t the greatest, but I can finely chop just fine. Unfortunately these happened to be the strongest shallots I have ever chopped, stronger even than most onions, and it took only a few seconds for my eyes to water profusely. I knew I had to soldier on, though. This is just the beginning! I chopped up the mushrooms and put it all in the butter.
“This doesn’t look right,” I called from the kitchen. I hoped my lovely partner would help me if I needed it, knowing my inexperience. But she had other expectations for this evening, hoping our swapping of roles would be more literal, and that she could sit back and not have to do any kitchen work this evening.
“What doesn’t look right?”
“The mushrooms. They look too dry. Am I doing it wrong?”
“Just put more butter in and stop stirring it so much!”
“Stop stirring it?”
“You don’t need to stir them very much.”
“What if it’s too much butter? I’m trying to follow the recipe.”
“You can’t have too much butter.”
“Can you just come look at it?”
She came over, exasperated, and gave the same advice. “More butter.”
Multi-tasking is not one of my strong suits. I also had to get the pork ready and try to take pictures of everything and it was all a bit much. She could have been nicer about all this, couldn’t she have? Is it wrong to think she should help me out here? This is a lot of pressure, making food I’ve never made before. She could have been nicer about it. I mean, don’t get me wrong, she’s great, and I wanted to make a wonderful meal for her, but I really didn’t want to mess it up either. Like, what good is it if I do it all on my own and it sucks? Shouldn’t she want to help? Does she want to eat a bad dinner just for the sake of being stubborn? Does she want our food blog to fail immediately, when our very first meal is a disaster? I wouldn’t think so.
I added more butter, and it did help. Then I added the cream and let it simmer for 3-5 minutes, as the recipe told me to do.
“This still doesn’t look right.” By this point I was crying. From the emotion of the situation, not the shallots. I couldn’t believe I was blowing it and she wasn’t even helping me fix it. This dinner was gonna be a disaster and it was as much her fault as it was mine.
She came back into the kitchen, reluctant of course, annoyed of course, tired of dealing with me of course. “It looks fine. Quit freaking out. You’re not allowed to cook anymore.”
It didn’t look fine. And I was pretty sure I was overcooking the pork, but I didn’t know how to do both at once. Especially when the sauce still looked like soup. Was she wrong about the butter? Did that much butter make the sauce too soupy? That couldn’t be it. But the pork was done now and I needed to get it all just right. And I needed to communicate to her my feelings, because it didn’t feel right for me to go through all this stress and work and care and anxiety trying something new to make her a nice meal and have her tell me I’m not allowed to cook anymore.
“You’re being a fucking asshole,” I told her.
“What?”
“You’re so condescending to me. Maybe this kind of shit is easy for you because you’ve done it a million times but I have never done this before. I don’t know what I’m doing and I don’t want to mess it up and I try to ask for your help but you won’t even help me you just make me feel like shit like I suck at this.”
“What is wrong with you? You’re freaking out over nothing and I might as well have just cooked it myself. This is way more stressful. I thought you wanted to cook dinner. I thought you wanted to do it because it would be fun for you. Clearly it’s not fun.”
“Okay well the pork is done, I guess it’s done.” Tears streaked my face and I kept sniffling, trying not to drip snot in the food. I didn’t even want to eat anymore.
I poured the wet soupy sauce onto the pork and plated it with potato wedges, but they got burnt to a crisp because I was so distracted from the arguing and her shitty attitude towards me.
The sauce sucked. 3-5 minutes isn’t nearly enough simmering. It needed to reduce by at least twice as much. The recipe below is not the recipe I made, but a tweaked version so the sauce comes out correctly. I had my partner make it the right way a few days later to make up for making me feel bad. Basically this Simply Recipes website almost ruined my relationship. If it had been done right, the way my partner made it and the way you should make it below, we never would have had this fight and almost broken up and I wouldn’t have burned the potatoes or gone to sleep crying alone.
Mushroom Sage Sauce:
Ingredients:
4 tablespoons salted butter
1/2 cup finely chopped shallots
8-10 ounces cremini or button mushrooms, thickly sliced
2 shiitake mushrooms, thinly sliced
1 cup dry white wine
1 cup heavy whipping cream
3 tablespoons chopped fresh sage
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste
Melt the butter in a large saute pan on medium-high heat. Add the shallots and saute for 1 minute.
Add the mushrooms and saute for ~10 minutes or until browned.
Add the white wine and deglaze the pan.
Stir in the cream and reduce until thick. As stated above the incorrect recipe suggests 3-5 minutes but in order to avoid a runny sauce it will take much longer. At least 10 minutes.
Stir in the sage and season with salt and pepper.
Pork Chops:
Ingredients:
2 bone-in pork chops
1 teaspoon extra virgin olive oil
½ teaspoon paprika
½ teaspoon cayenne pepper (optional)
Salt and pepper to taste
Heat a cast iron or stainless steel pan to medium-high heat then coat pan with olive oil.
Pat the pork chops dry then cover both sides with seasoning, rubbing into the pork chop like a dry rub. Sear the pork chops for two minutes on each side, then reduce (or turn off completely) heat to finish cooking.
Finish by pouring the sauce over the pork chops and allow to sit a couple minutes so the pork chop can absorb some of the sauce flavor.
Serve it up and enjoy a meal that will never cause conflict between you and a loved one.
