Month 7 day 2: Breakfast sandwich and pork

Today I made:
a Ham and Swiss Provolone Egg Sandwich, Cooking Light August 2011
Grilled Pork Chops with Swiss Chard Salad, Every Day with Rachael Ray July/August 2012

I had some extra ham, cheese, and bread left over from the Nuevo Cubano, so I decided to make this breakfast sandwich. Of course, it's provolone instead of Swiss and a loaf instead of an English muffin, but it's the same idea. I wished that instead of putting the bread with cheese on it under the broiler, I had toasted the bread by itself a bit first. Also, something I realized is that for Cooking Light recipes, you should always err on the side of using too much oil, never too little. So if it says that you should re-oil the pan in between the ham and the eggs, you really should or else your egg will stick a lot :-/

I don't normally eat a leisurely breakfast at home with tea, but it was really nice :) Maybe I should do it more often! But it did end up pushing my work time back about an hour, because while I was eating I picked up The Atlantic and started reading a bit, and once I was finished eating I was still busy reading. Oh well, I stayed late.

So it was a good thing that dinner was a fast one:

The longest part of preparing this meal was looking for hazelnuts. They used to be available in the baking section, but lately Shaw's has been revamping itself. It seems like they are expanding their organic selections but at the expense of the normal items. So you can no longer get small packets of chopped hazelnuts for baking, but you can get fairly large (1-2 cup) containers of raw hazelnuts in the "all-natural" snack section. Of course it costs much more this way and is not where you would typically look for hazelnuts, which I don't think are typically eaten as a snack food :-/
Anyway, this is just some pork rubbed with some vinaigrette, then a raw kale + chopped hazelnut salad tossed with the remaining vinaigrette. The vinaigrette flavor isn't very strong in either part, which is too bad, but this dinner was good anyway. I have been wanting to eat some pork since reading Julie Powell's (of Julie and Julia fame) second memoir, Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession. The descriptions of her butcher apprenticeship are really interesting and made me want to learn a little more about the different cuts of meat, but basically she's an awful person. Her husband, who she describes as a "saint"so many times in the first book for supporting her when she's a hysterical mess in the kitchen, gets cheated on, and then even once her lover breaks it off with her, she spends the rest of the book avoiding her husband and stalking (seriously) the ex-lover, all the while refusing to hear any suggestions of going to couple's therapy or considering divorce. At the end of the book I guess they figured something out...???? in that the husband sort of embraces uncertainty??? but it seems like not an ideal scenario. I checked this book out of the library so that I would not contribute to her making money off of a story about treating her husband awfully. Anyway, it was interesting though and did make me want to eat pork, so I was glad to have this recipe in the lineup for tonight. I didn't actually use chops, because I had some cut (I don't remember what) in the freezer from a couple weeks ago when I bought two types of pork not having looked at the required amounts, only to realize that I did not need the second portion at all. It was pretty thick though, so it took a while to cook it well-done, and then was a bit chewy. I think it's probably time to invest in a good meat thermometer. I bought one once, but it's so awful that if you just hold it in your hand it displays that it's 170°F, good enough for poultry. So... no.
This recipe is from Rachael Ray's "Dinners for a Deal" section of <$3 per serving meals. I don't know how much stuff cost exactly, but I'm guessing it wasn't quite there given that the hazelnut box was $7. I guess if you prorate it you might be ok.