Mmmm, pork chop...

I went to the butcher's at lunchtime to buy meat to have for dinner tonight with some of the rather large assortment of root vegetables that turned up in this week's vegbox (an occupational hazard of vegboxes; I don't think I'd want to be vegetarian and rely on one at this time of year, because while I never met a root vegetable I didn't like there is a limited number of main-dish uses). Normally when I do this we end up with lamb chops, or maybe sausages, but today I decided I fancied a change and bought pork chops instead.

We used to eat pork chops a lot, generally either braised with apples and cider or in a Fifties-America mushroom sauce made with Campbells' condensed mushroom soup, but somehow we got out of the habit. Possibly because it seemed to be difficult to get pork chops any more; I can remember looking in supermarkets and only finding pork steaks, which aren't the same thing at all and were no good at all when we had a dog who thought pork chop bones were the best thing ever; possibly also because we found sources of really good local lamb and started eating lamb chops a lot more instead. At any rate, it's been a long time since we last had pork chops; long enough that neither of us could remember exactly how we'd used to cook them.

We did remember having them with mushrooms, though, and that seemed like a good idea for tonight as the vegbox had also brought quite a lot of mushrooms. Googling produced Delia's recipe for pork chops baked with mushrooms and creme fraiche, which sounded like just the ticket.

Our fresh mushrooms were ordinary chestnut mushrooms, rather than wild mushrooms, but we had dried porcini and all the other ingredients. It's a nice straightforward recipe, perfect for a weekday evening when I'd been late at work and really wasn't feeling up to complicated cooking. I wasn't quite sure about the instruction to dollop the creme fraiche on top of the chops and mushrooms before baking; if I was doing it again I think I'd mix it in with the mushrooms to make more of a sauce, but we both enjoyed the end result anyway. We had it with mashed potato, swede and carrot (roughly the same amount of each); definitely a good winter dinner.