Cookin' With Cat #5

Well, spring is officially here: my allergies have arrived. Pfui. It happens every year; just when it starts to get warm and nice outside, the trees decide to get together and punch me good and hard in the sinuses.

Regardless, it's time to wrap up the first season of Cookin' With Cat with another simple, delicious dish (slightly modified from the same source as the last few): pork cutlets with smothered parmesan green beans!

Start out by sautéing 3 or 4 thinly-sliced shallots and a couple of chopped garlic cloves until they're nice and golden in 2 tablespoons of unsalted butter and 1 tablespoon of olive oil, along with a quarter teaspoon of salt and an eighth of a teaspoon of black pepper:

Next, add two-thirds of a cup of white wine and boil until reduced by half:

Add two-thirds of a cup of cream, half a cup of water, two teaspoons of chopped fresh sage (this is key!), another quarter teaspoon of salt and eighth of a teaspoon of pepper, and bring just to a boil:

Now for the super-easy, time-saving step: dump in a big bag of frozen french-cut green beans:

Cover it up and simmer gently, stirring every now and then, for about 20 minutes - until the beans are thawed and cooked. Then, pour the beans and sauce into a bowl and set it aside somewhere where it'll stay warm.

Now, wipe out your skillet, and cook up a batch of boneless pork cutlets however you like them. I went for a simple sprinkle with salt and pepper, trying not to overcook them too badly.

Once the meat is done, put it on a plate and dump the beans back in the pan to warm up, scraping up all the browned meat bits from the bottom of the pan:

Add half a cup of grated parmesan and, if you have some, a bunch of chopped parsley:

Stir to melt everything together, and serve the meat on top of a big dollop of beans. We had brown rice, too, which worked really well!

Notice Tobu in the background there, showing his usual level of interest in Cookin'.

So, for our first five episodes, we've had okonomiyaki, Monte Cubano sandwiches, garlicky black pepper shrimp with black-eyed peas, Provençal chicken and tomato roast, and pork chops with creamed green beans. Lots of tasty food! I think the real winner (besides Anita's always-reliable okonomiyaki) has to be the shrimp. We'll be making that again for sure. The others are good, but maybe not exciting enough to make again. We'll see.